Ai Weiwei
What I said before

Ai will show you blueprints, sign a contract, take the check, and build something different and cheaper -paying for a wall of glass you’ll get three foot windows- and pocket the difference with his contractor. There are people for more deserving of release from Chinese prisons on grounds of conscience, but not impact. He’s a rock star with fans and acolytes and when he chooses to cause trouble he can do it.

Ai is a trickster capitalist, a Duchampian con man as oligarch. I don’t have to like him to like his work. But I don’t have to approve of it to like it.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995