repeats

Ai Weiwei

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

Ai Weiwei and Philippe Starck
In re: discussion of Damien Hirst at Art Market Monitor. My comment there and below. [years later all comments are gone] 

“Art World Hates Hirst’s Spots, Everyone Else Loves Them”
Show me the market model that describes where this leads? He makes objects, not movies. How many t-shirts and coffee mugs can he sell? He’s at the economic center of franchised one ring circus, but he’s not Prince or even Lady Gaga. Warhol’s work has always taken precedence over his persona: Warholism is a sideshow. Ai Weiwei’s model is Philippe Starck, What’s next for Hirst?

The shows are a brilliant move, and the prizes for those who see all of them top it nicely, but he’s the leader of a party game at a party for a tiny number of people, a few of whom at least think they’re part of something historically “important”. He’ll die rich, and he’ll last; whether his artwork will is another question.

He'll last as showmen do: as a character.

Roberta Smith in The Times.
While acknowledging the focus on spectacle, she tries to turn the discussion and the work back towards something she's more comfortable with, but in trying to defend formalism and the Modern tradition she's left with nothing more than the various levels of craftsmanship of the assistants, and design.

LA Times

Asghar Farhadi's domestic drama 'A Separation' won the best foreign language film award at the 69th Golden Globes on Sunday.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association

Iranian.com [now archive.org but still up at PBS and Juan Cole]
"Statement signed by scholars, academicians, journalists, and activists condemning murder of Iranian Technical and Scientific Experts"

...These types of killings have to stop, not only because they harm a nation's scientific community and its civilians, but also because they build a deep psychological scar on the nation's public mind prompting it to ask for revenge in kind. We hope we are living in a better world than that. Killing innocent or even allegedly guilty people without consideration for their human rights and due process, by any force or government anywhere and anytime, is an outrageous act to be protested by all. If covert targeted assassinations of opponents become the order of the day, no one will be safe in this world.

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

Ai Weiwei

However Ai suspects that the order may be linked to two high-profile campaigns that have embarrassed and angered the Shanghai government in recent years. In 2008, Ai was instrumental in turning the case of Yang Jia, a man who stabbed six policeman to death after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, into an internet cause-celebre. This year Ai made a documentary to highlight the plight of a Shanghai-based activist-lawyer called Feng Zhenghu, who spent more than 100 days marooned at Tokyo's Narita airport after being refused entry to China eight times by Shanghai officials.

Last year Ai underwent cranial surgery after being beaten by police in Sichuan province when he went to give evidence in support of another activist, Tan Zuoren, who was jailed for investigating the collapse of thousands of schools in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008.

Ai, who is a relentless user of the microblog Twitter, is best known for co designing Beijing's Olympic stadium, the Birds Nest, which some hoped would herald a more open China. Ai has since renounced that work as a "fake smile".

"I think the intention is not have Mr Ai back in Shanghai after my involvement in those two cases," Ai added, "this is not about money. They have agreed to pay me back the money. It's about China after the Olympics, after the [Shanghai] Expo. These officials have no basic sense of truth. No morals." [Hey! They're paying you back!] To mark the demolition of the studio, Ai has issued an open invitation, via Twitter, to a party this Sunday at which he will serve 10,000 river crabs, a local delicacy but also an extravagant jibe at local officialdom.

In Chinese the word for river crab, "hexie", sounds very similar to that for "harmony", the ideological buzzword of the current regime which is frequently used ironically by Chinese internet users – as in "my new art studio has just been 'harmonised'."

Buyer beware. Ai is an "architect" who once showed a client a set of drawings then built something different and cheaper, splitting the cash with the contractor. The other building his contractor built on the site was designed by a boutique American firm, and if anything that was a bigger disaster, though the worst that could be said of the contractor in that case was that he did what he was told and laughed all the way to the bank. I'm sure Ai got a cut of that too.  At this point I'm willing to bet Ai signed on to the stadium project -as "artistic consultant"- always planning to attack it once it got built and he got paid, mixing politics, showmanship and greed. A brilliant way to play the game. All of this reflects on the work but not on the question of whether it's any good or not.

Study in Perspective: The White House, Tiananmen Square, Eiffel Tower, 
3 from a series of 7 Gelatin silver prints, each: 15 5/16" x 23 1/4", 1995-2003

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, B/W prints each: 47 5/8" x 58 1/4"), 1995

As he said later, the 3 photographs are now more valuable than the 2000 year old pot he destroyed.