BEIJING (AP).- Artist Ai Weiwei has again criticized China's leaders as lacking vision and
refusing to permit dissenting voices, saying the government's mantra of
maintaining stability is merely a ruse to protect illicit benefits and special
interests. The country's best known
international artist
said he would continue to fight for human rights and
freedom of expression
in a videotaped message posted Monday on YouTube, which is
blocked in China.
He said that the form of limited house
arrest
under which he has lived for months is punishment for his activism. "Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me
to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect
this right and also to fight for the possibility," Ai said in the
message that was shown at an event in Basel, Switzerland, late Sunday. The
event was organized by Germany-based Cinema for Peace Foundation and also saw
the screening of Alison Klayman's
documentary "Ai Weiwei Never Sorry."
Chinese authorities
view Ai as a troublemaker. They detained him for three months last year and his design
company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) in back taxes and
fines. He is appealing. Since then, he has been refused permission
to travel and is under constant surveillance, although he still frequently criticizes the government on Twitter, another website
that is blocked in China but accessible to tech-savvy citizens.
Ai said
self-interest is China's only political ideology and the "people in office
just try to maintain so-called stability to protect their own profit, or their
own interest. They have to crush
other voices. There's no real communication or discussion." The Internet can
help boost transparency, while art can stir critical thinking, he said. "I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human
freedom," Ai said. Ai's detention has only
burnished his fame
and his handmade porcelain "Sunflower Seeds"sold at auction
last month for $782,500, a record for the artist.
NOTE:Although
I
remain of two minds about Ai Weiwei's art,
which sometimes seems derivative, decorative (not necessarily a bad thing; not
necessarily a good thing) and overly decorous, reading his words in defense of art and
and artistic and human freedom is uplifting and makes me admire the man enormously. I believe I'm beginning to
warm to the "Sunflower
Seeds,” although I'm not usually inspired by allegory or one-note
explanation-key symbolism.
Still, Ralph Shikes'
The
Indignant Eye, The Artist As Social Critic In Prints And Drawings From The
Fifteenth Century To Picasso, has always been a touchstone for me and I
think Ai Weiwei's work would deserve to be included what would be a
long-overdue new edition of that classic study of political and socially conscious art.
I hope I have an
opportunity to see Alison Klayman's documentary "Ai Weiwei
Never Sorry" very soon and that Ai Weiwei's words and art-actions have a salutary
effect on China and the rest of the world.
A museum employee passes an instillation
entitled "Forever
Bicycles" during
the “Ai Weiwei, Absent” exhibition by Chinese outspoken artist Ai Weiwei at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 25, 2011.
TAIPEI
(AP).-
Taiwan's
president urged China on Friday to respect the artistic freedom of outspoken
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was detained for nearly three months earlier this
year and is currently confined to Beijing.
“He's an
artist and should have the freedom to express his artistic views,"
President Ma Ying-jeou said after viewing Ai's exhibition at a Taipei museum.
"This is also the core value of Taiwan."
Ma said
he deplored that Chinese police detained Ai at the Beijing airport on April 3
as the conceptual artist was about to depart for Taiwan to prepare for the
exhibit.
The
detention came during a sweeping Chinese crackdown on activists and sparked an
international outcry over China's deteriorating human rights situation. Ai was
released in June but is prohibited from leaving Beijing.
China's
government says Ai was detained on tax evasion charges. However, activists say
he is being punished for his often outspoken criticism of the authoritarian
government.
The exhibit at Taipei's Fine Arts Museum,
titled "Ai Weiwei, Absent,"focuses on the political significance of
the artist's inability to attend.
The
exhibit of 21 works, which opened last month and runs through late January,
includes a white marble-made helmet and a surveillance camera, which Ai created
to mock China as a police state. Another piece consists of 1,000 bicycles piled
in layers, reflecting his perception of the rapid pace of Chinese social
change.
The exhibit in Taiwan has a political significance of its own.
Unlike the communist mainland, the island of 23 million people is a
freewheeling democracy with few restrictions on expression.
"The distance between Taiwan and China will be determined by their
views on human rights protection," Ma said. "When our views get
closer, the two sides will move closer."
Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, but China still
claims the self-ruled island a part of its own territory. Since Ma took office
in 2008, tensions between the two sides have dropped to their lowest point in
decades.
Ma has pushed for economic engagement with Beijing, but refuses
to have political dialogue.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press Photos: Wally Santana, AP
"Amarble sculpture by Chinese dissident
artist Ai Weiwei entitled 'Marble Arm' is seen at ART HK 11, Asia's
largest art fair, Hong Kong, China, 25 May 2011.
Ai Weiwei has not been
seen since his detention by the Chinese authorities on 04 April 2011.
Despite China's crackdown on the artist, the ART HK 11 is able to host
galleries from around the world, some of whom are displaying his work
under the 'one country, two systems' agreement which guarantees freedom
of artistic expression in Hong Kong, under the city's mini-constitution,
or 'Basic Law'.
ART HK 11 will run from 26-29 May 2011, and will host
260 galleries from 38 countries. EPA/ALEX HOFFORD."
Andy Warhol, 200 One Dollar Bills, 1962, Silkscreen on canvas, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
"Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist."
"Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery"
-- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A To B And Back Again), 1975
As I recall, when Andy Warhol published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A To B And Back Again) in 1975, the reviewing press was amused, as they should have been, by the artist's witty musings, but didn't "get it". Many reviewers wondered "is he being serious or is he kidding?", as if it were the first time any of them had run into this kind of sardonic, ironic, yet ultimately good natured and positive material, reflecting on many of the things we all think about (art, love, work, fame, life in general) all the time.
Given the book's open and generous nature and its broadly comedic qualities, one would have to conclude that people who seriously ask questions of that sort will never "get it". Warhol's ruminations on a life spent figuring out art's Greater Grub Street workings was simply beyond them.
Today I read a list of ArtReview's "10 most powerful individuals in the world of art 2010".
They are:
1. Larry Gagosian/United States/gallerist
2. Hans Ulrich Obrist/Switzerland/curator
3. Iwan Wirth/Switzerland/gallerist
4. David Zwirner/Germany/gallerist
5. Glenn D. Lowry/United States/museum director
6. Bice Curiger/Switzerland/curator
7. Nicholas Serota/Britain/museum director
8. Eli Broad/United States/collector
9. RoseLee Goldberg/South Africa/curator
10. Francois Pinault/France/collector
Reuters' coverage of the list and, in particular, top man Larry Gagosian, runs as follows:
“U.S. collector and gallery owner Larry Gagosian has been named the art world's most powerful figure in the annual ArtReview ranking, dominated this year by established commercial galleries.
Gagosian has nine galleries around the world after opening a new space in Paris, as well as an office in Hong Kong and a shop in New York.
He reclaims the position he held in 2004, and in the last 12 months staged "museum quality" exhibitions of Picasso, Monet, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Prince and the Crash group show, a homage to J.G. Ballard.
‘Some of what he shows is extraordinary, but it's increasingly served up with a side dish of arrogance,’ ArtReview wrote on Thursday.
‘This is not appealing, but it's the behavior of power in excelsis, when all competition has vanished from the rearview.’”
As much as I love the word "gallerist" (although I doubt that I'll be using it frequently) and enjoy the organizing medium of lists for various purposes, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's dictum that "the function of art is to imitate nature in its manner of operation" is more my speed and, sentimental and wrong-headed as it can often seem, I consider the lives of the artists I admire to have a certain Lives of the Saints quality because of the intellectual and visual pleasure they give me, which enhances my own life. Prestige and power lists are a major turn-off -- typical Vanity Fair-esque easy reading garbage that suborns and transforms the lazy and uncommitted into daisy chains of duped conformists.
Andrea Mantegna, St. Sebastian, 1459, oil on wood panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
As for a "gallerist" taking top prize, according to ArtReview:
"In 2010, for better or worse, power lay with the established commercial gallery market," ArtReview said in its introduction to the ranking, which is decided by an anonymous panel of experts and published during the Frieze Art Fair in London.
'Funding cuts by governments internationally weakened the hand of museum directors worldwide, allowing the financial might and artist rosters handled by the likes of Gagosian and Wirth to step in, it added."
Number 1, Larry Gagosian, Gallerist
Number 6
Maybe, just maybe, this "business art" occasion is simply the newest effloresence of "anti-art", an ultimately Dadaist bit of "expression" that we simply haven't discerned at this point. After all, didn't even arch-Dada mentor Marcel Duchamp himself labor behind the scenes, energetically brokering art deals for most of his career, while allowing the world to believe he did nothing but play chess? Or maybe not. Perhaps it's just a case of an impoverished, weakened zeitgeist. Artists themselves were Power List Also-Rans. Reuters reported that heartless art thug, Damien Hirst, "whose company topped the list in 2008 shortly after he raised $193 million at a record-breaking one-man auction at Sotheby's, slumped to 48th in 2009 and slipped further to 53rd in 2010".
The highest ranking artist on the list at number 13 was People's Republic Of China artist Ai Weiwei, described by ArtReview as "a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities". However, they also warned:
"(A) question hangs over his seeming ubiquity on the gallery circuit: can he maintain viewers' interest, or is he in danger of overexposure?"
I have no idea and no opinion about this, but below is a neat photo of Ai Weiwei's current project at the Tate Modern in London.
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, October, 2010 (Installation at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London. The work consists of one hundred million hand-painted porcelain "seeds," each individually painted by "an army of 1,600 Chinese artisans," and scattered over the floor of the Hall.)
For me, the most interesting art news of the day, which I could consume without feeling in the least bit core-foundation-challenged or compromised (and which actually briefly raised my buffetted and dampened spirits), was learning that James Cameron intends to film a new big budget version of "Cleopatra" with Angelina Jolie playing the Empress of the Nile. Ms. Jolie's reported comments on the project, while a little bland, indicated both a familiarity with the historical Cleopatra (including the lives of her ancestors and her descendants) and a lot of enthusiasm. I've always thought that Cleopatra's story is pretty inexhaustible for movie purposes. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to view a sensational Cleopatra-related show at the British Museum and emerged with a strong desire to film the life story of Cleopatra's daughter, Cleopatra Selene II, myself. Fortunately, I didn't see any comments from director Cameron, which would probably have spoiled the mood. I really hope that the rumor about casting Brad Pitt to play the role of Marc Antony is just a rumor.
Here is a photo of Angelina Jolie that appeared in the press yesterday dressed roughly in the manner of Cleopatra (I assume). Actually, I think it's a very lifelike, beautiful mannequin.
Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can, 1964, Silkscreen on canvas, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City
