In 1965, just seven years after Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama moved to New York, her installation "Infinity Mirror Room -- Phalli's Field " opened at Richard Castellane Gallery. It was, simply speaking, an enclosed room, about 25 square meters wide, with walls measuring in at just over eight feet tall.

Yet the mirrored panels arranged throughout the room disoriented the space, making it a claustrophobic cavern one moment, an infinite kaleidoscope the next. The floor was covered with hundreds of soft red and white fabric-covered protuberances, phallic pillows psychosexual and playful. Teeming with red and white polka dots, the soft tubers tangle to form a three-dimensional floor that's both comforting and threatening.

Fifty years later, Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms continue to be among the most popular attractions at major museums and galleries around the world. "Fireflies on the Water " lit up the Whitney in 2012, "The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away" is currently drawing obscene lines at The Broad in Los Angeles, and a mirror-laden Kusama retrospective titled "In Infinity " has taken over Cophenhagen's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art .

The contemporary manifestations of Kusama's works have remained relatively constant -- the dizzying sense of limited infinity, the uncanny proliferation of the viewer in the space, the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, the sensation of slipping into another world for a matter of mere minutes. There is, however, one major distinction. In the 1960s, participants in Kusama's installation weren't carrying cell phones. And they weren't taking selfies.