Around 3 a.m. Wednesday, Debbie Weber’s number finally came up: After 13 hours of waiting, it was her chance to secure two tickets to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition, which opens in March.Had she been conscious to see it, she might have claimed them, too. “Of course, I was fast asleep,” she said, “so I went right to the back of the line.”Later that morning she finally secured tickets for the exhibition, a touring career survey of the octogenarian Japanese artist. By then, though, her frustration still outweighed her relief.“Why did I have to go through that?” said Weber, who first logged in to the gallery’s online ticketing system at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. “Usually, to get your members’ pass, you just go online and book a ticket — very relaxed, very normal. But this was frantic. It felt like mass hysteria marketing.”Kusama didn’t break the internet, as the popular online meme goes, but she had surely stressed the AGO’s corner of it to the max. The AGO’s system comfortably handles about 1,500 ticket sales an hour, which has always been more than sufficient. On Tuesday, the first day of its members-only ticket reservations, online queues went from zero to 10,000 people at the opening gun, peaking at 18,000 not long after. “It feels like we’ve been selling tickets for an Adele concert,” said Lisa Clements, the AGO’s Chief of Communications and Brand. “We’ve never experienced anything like this before.”Hundreds came to the AGO’s Facebook page to complain. “9.5 hours later and still no tickets!” wrote a user named Heidi Ash. “Was this a publicity stunt to generate hype? Because all it is doing is creating frustration and anger with loyal members!”Throughout the thread, the AGO apologized, counseled, guided and soothed. The entire experience, said Clements, has been a crash course in un ...
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