Monumental but meaningless
Ai Weiwei’s art is monumental but meaningless
Ai Weiwei, I suspect, would like me to feel guilt, and as I walk out of his new exhibition, guilt is what I feel. Not, though, over my complicity in Britain’s imperial deeds, or our more recent adventures abroad, both of which Ai invokes while studying the murky legacies of the West.
Rather, I’m guilty about the prospect of giving two stars to Button Up! Ai himself can take it: now 68 years old, he’s perhaps the world’s best-known living artist, a Western poster boy for resisting the Chinese regime – he lives, at least some of the time, in Britain – and his name alone should generate healthy ticket sales.
Button Up!, too, mounted in a single vast space at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, and described as Ai’s “largest site-specific exhibition to date”, is neatly presented – even, occasionally, stark. No blame accrues to the proverbial village, from curatorial staff to specialist artisans, who’ve brought it all into being. The problem, from top to bottom, is Ai Weiwei.
It may be meaningless and it seems to be woke, but it does display the art of governing supposedly educated minds.
It is not, then, the facts in themselves that strike the popular imagination, but the way in which they take place and are brought under notice. It is necessary that by their condensation, if I may thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind. To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.
Gustave Le Bon – The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)
Source: https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2026/07/monumental-but-meaningless.html
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