"Festival of Life" (2017) is reproduced from David Zwirner Books' new release of the same name—which comes with a pull-out poster of this very image. Essayist Jenni Sorkin cites the "ornamental urge" (a term coined by German psychiatrist and expert on visionary art Hanz Prinzhorn) in Kusama's work. "Half moons, spirals, polka dots, curlicues and circular zigzags, paisley ovoids, almond-shaped eyes, round faces, concentric circles: there is no closure, only circularity, which itself functions as both a metaphor and a fact of life—the ongoing urgency to produce repetitively. Her work lashes together such collective tropes through the resonance of circles, circling back, as it were, to the very ideas that thematize and define the human experience. Kusama emphasizes our similar circuitry: the circular logic of our minds, the roundness of our planet, and the tiny shimmering light, a pinprick (also a circle) that we make collectively, marking the universe only briefly."