HUFFINGTON
09.30.12
THE DISRUPTOR
artists in New York. Over the
years, they’ve headed down opposing paths, and Ai’s detention
appears to have affected Xu’s
willingness to acknowledge him.
Two years ago, he expressed his
disagreement with Ai’s blackand-white representation of
China to the New Yorker, but
also allowed, “certain ideals, like
democracy and freedom... made
a deep impression on [Ai]” and
that “if China doesn’t permit a
man like Ai Weiwei, well, then
it has a problem.” When Ai was
detained last year, Xu told the
Financial Times abruptly: “I
really don’t know about Ai Weiwei’s situation and I’m not really
interested in politics.”
Ai would disagree. Artists
such as Xu are very political,
he says. Just on the side of the
government.
“They tolerate every wrong act
the government makes,” Ai says.
“They know in China no museum
can be called a museum, but they
enjoy that the government will
build another 2,000 museums in
the next few years, and they will
make a lot of money.”
Any attempt to explain the Chinese art market will simplify it.
But Cohen clarifies that it’s be-
“HE WAS
REGARDED AS ‘GOD
AI’ IN THE TWITTER
COMMUNITY, BECAUSE
HE REPRESENTED
THE FUNNIEST WAY
TO BE POLITICAL.”
come a fully capitalist one, and
it’s commonly held that money
has warped priorities.
Ai thinks his detention would
have been decried more had it
happened in the 70s, when he
first entered the Chinese contemporary art scene. “We were a
small group, maybe two dozen or
three dozen artists,” Ai remembers. “We were very close, and we
made a lot of noise.”
And here is where Ai makes
a controversial thesis, one he’s
bandied about before, and
recently resuscitated: you cannot
be a true contemporary Chinese
artist without criticizing contemporary China. He expanded
on this in a Guardian op-ed earlier this month, announcing that