Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Miami Artist Breaks Ai WeiWei Vase in Protest.

To protest the lack of attention paid to local artists, a Miami area artist smashed one of Ai WeiWei's famed painted vases valued at $1million. Take a look…
http://hyperallergic.com/109783/artist-smashes-ai-weiwei-vase-to-protest-museums-snub-of-local-artists/

An interesting side-note to the story…the original controversy was with the artist Ai WeiWei himself as he's done multiple installations based around his own destruction of ancient Ming Dynasty vases…including the very vase destroyed here. Ai Weiwei "destroyed" the ancient vase by painting all over it, only to see his artwork destroyed...

so what is worse? Destroying and ancient artifact for art…or destroying art for protest? Or is there really a difference at all?

And Jonathan Jones takes on this very question…
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/feb/18/ai-weiwei-han-urn-smash-miami-art

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