The Uses of Ai Weiwei

Journal entry for 25 Apr 2011 | Link

Jane Freilicher

Jane Freilicher, Bouquets, 2011, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches, courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Today saw the appearance of my review of "Jane Freilicher: Paintings and Prints" at Tibor de Nagy Gallery:

Jane Freilicher commands unalloyed reverence from fellow painters. I learned from a gallery director at Tibor de Nagy, for instance, that Thomas Nozkowski, whose work featured in their recently concluded “Object/Image” show, expressed elation at being exhibited alongside her. Any decent painter with a lick of sense would. As one of the last true scions of Giorgio Morandi, she combines a probing touch with a keen color sense to produce paintings of visceral power out of all proportion to the delicacy and limits of her subject: namely, as it has been for decades, still lifes set up in front of a window.

Read the whole thing here.

The Uses of Ai Weiwei

There's little one can say at this point about the imprisonment and probable torture of Ai Weiwei that doesn't restate the obvious, at least what would be obvious in a free society. You should sign the petition calling for his release sponsored by Change.org, which Chinese hackers, likely with government backing, have been subjecting to dedicated denial-of-service attacks. This petition is endorsed by AICA-USA, of which I'm a member, and Artcritical, to which I contribute. According to the Voice of America, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei says that "the Chinese people are unhappy about international support for the outspoken government critic," attributing the displeasure of the autocracy to its largely blameless and wholly unrepresented citizens. (Hong also said in response to the criticism that the "United States should address its own human rights record." Thank you, George W. Bush, for destroying our moral standing in the world.)

Less obvious was this assertion of "confluence" by Tyler Green.

Just as China decided an artist was so important and threating [sic] that he had to be silenced, Washington’s newspaper-of-record decided that art isn't worth a single full-time staffer.

In case you missed it, Blake Gopnik left the Washington Post in December to write for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and the paper handed his duties to its present architecture critic. What does this have to do with Ai?

So far art-interested funders and the art world have yet to embrace—or seriously consider—[a] model [of non-profit journalism], to intensely consider what it would mean for art and artists if news coverage and critical consideration of art and artists continues to be pushed out of the mainstream and into the narrow confines of the art ghetto. Perhaps the Post's downgrade of its art critic position ignites that conversation. After all, if the Chinese realize that artists are important to a society, shouldn't we?

Green has been beating this drum about non-profit journalism for years. (He provides links if you care to follow them.) But there's no confluence here. China throws high-profile critics of the government into jail and tortures them with alarming regularity. It's not that they take artists especially seriously—they're a thin-skinned totalitarian regime. The utility of Ai's arrest to China's leadership isn't in Ai's being an artist, but an internationally celebrated one. Meanwhile the Washington Post is making a business decision, probably based on accurate information, that relatively few of its readers follow art or are interested in what the paper has to say about it, and thus will allocate its resources elsewhere. The comparison isn't even apples to oranges. It's apples to orangutans.

There are plenty of arguments for non-profit arts journalism, but Ai's imprisonment says nothing about the matter, and Green's dragging him into the issue is distasteful. It is likely that visual art in its current form, and what its critics have to say about it, does not interest enough people to merit a full-time critic position at a newspaper in its current form. "Artists are important to society" is not a fact, and it may not even be a majority opinion. Presuming it true in public may meet with huzzahs from the choir, but they're not the ones who need persuading.

If anything, the attrition of critics at the papers may be the closest we thing we have to evidence that artists are decreasingly important to society. It's easy enough to presume greed and philistinism on the part of the papers, and that presumption may be accurate in many respects. But it's up to the art itself to compel people to care about it, and if it fails to do so, then people compelling each other to care about it instead is a second-best substitute. The latter is what critics do, in summary. We're the ones who come forward to say that this stuff matters. It matters that it's being done well over here, and it matters that it's being done poorly over there. But it doesn't matter in the way that free speech and a fair legal system matter—that is, to everyone without exception. It matters to the subset of people with the aligning sensibilities and interests. Even apart from the academy's, and thus the art world's, embrace of philosophies that doubt universal or absolute values in art, which are the only qualities of art that might imbue it with importance on a societal scale, taste is always an exception, and its cultivation is the highest work of civilization but never its broadest. Maybe it never belonged in the newspapers in the first place, but it appeared there because artistic achievements were once more newsworthy than they are now.

In the meantime, let one more voice declare: Free Ai Weiwei.