Alexander Guo had been waiting in the baking sun since 6:45 a.m. - nearly five and a half hours. Finally, ahead of him, people in line took three or four steps forward.

"It's moving again!" Mr. Guo, a 20-year-old Williams College junior, shouted on a recent Saturday morning. "It's a miracle!"

Since early May, Mr. Guo and tens of thousands of others - art lovers, technology buffs and the merely curious - have trooped to the Museum of Modern Art for a chance to experience "Rain Room," an installation in which water rains down except where sensors detect people, giving visitors the illusion of walking between the drops. The installation was to close on July 28.

Created by the art collective rAndom International, it received tepid reviews from art critics. Writing in The New York Times, Ken Johnson said, "'Rain Room,' for all its entertaining ingenuity, seems little more than a gimmicky diversion." But fueled by thousands of photos - dramatically backlighted - posted on social media, and by the increasing popularity of immersive art, people have been willing to stand for hours in 32-plus-degree Celsius weather to snap their own pictures inside.

"It's a New York thing - FOMO," said Brianne Chai-Onn, 34, using the acronym for "fear of missing out."

"A lot of people have this syndrome," she said while waiting in line. "That's why we don't sit in our apartments."

The average wait on weekdays has been four to five hours for nonmembers and two to three hours for members, who use a fast-track line. Weekends are worse; a nonmember can expect to wait more than five hours. Some visitors on a recent weekend reported waiting nine hours.

The wait is partly a result of the artists' decision to cap the exhibit's capacity to 10 at a time - a mob would trigger the sensors into shutting off the rain entirely - and by the many visitors who ignore the museum's request to limit visits to 10 minutes. So far, roughly 55,000 visitors have passed through "Rain Room," according to the Modern.

The lines seem to defy rational explanation, even to those devoting their time to them.

"There has to be a reason people are waiting this long," said Sylvana Fernandez, 24, about four hours into her wait.

Laurie Garrett, 61, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, waited for two hours on her third attempt to see the show. The museum, she said, treated visitors like "cattle in line."

"I don't understand why they didn't have a reservation system," said Ms. Garrett, who lives in Brooklyn. "And it's July! There were people who were melting on the sidewalk." Afterward, she said that though she was impressed by the engineering, she was underwhelmed by the experience.

The Modern had an inkling demand would be strong: When "Rain Room" made its debut last fall in London, waiting times hit 12 hours. In London, where "Rain Room" was free, the average visit was seven minutes. At the Modern, where admission is $25, some linger for 45 minutes.

And in New York, at least four couples have become engaged surrounded by the rain, according to the Modern.

Scott Milam, a 27-year-old wedding photographer, brought his girlfriend, Molly Caldwell, from Phoenix to ask her to marry him. She "has always been convinced it would rain on her wedding day," Mr. Milam said. "When I saw 'Rain Room' on Instagram, I was blown away and went, 'Gosh, I can't make it rain on her wedding day, but I can on the day I propose to her.'"

She said yes.

The New York Times

(China Daily 07/28/2013 page12)