Art critic destroys million dollar masterpiece

And I don’t mean he “destroyed” it metaphorically in a thumbs-down review. No, he literally smashed it into a thousand shards right there on the floor of the gallery! The piece was a porcelain sculpture celebrating, you guessed it, the great Ai Weiwei himself! Apparently he’s trying to figure out who he is after all these years. I’ve always been skeptical about Ai Weiwei and his greatness. When you listen to his interviews, he’s more likely to be mistaken for Chance the gardener than Confucius. He tipped his hand with that bullshit “Straight” exhibition around 2013. He and his team salvaged 90 or 120 or 150 tons of rebar from collapsed school buildings after an earthquake in China, chipped off the concrete, straightened them, and voila!.. a profound statement about… I was never sure what. Earthquakes? Building codes? I don’t know much about art, but I’m fairly knowledgeable about rebar. One thing I know for sure is salvaged rebar from a collapsed building is never ever gonna be straightened. Oh, you might get it straight enough to reuse it again, as rebar. But not as an art exhibit! Ever! Yet, that art exhibit travelled the world. Clearly, they ordered a fresh batch of rebar in every city they landed in! Nobody shleps 50 tons of rebar around the world for the sake of art! He followed that up with the ultra-cringe Alan Kurdi artwork, wherein he pretended to be a drowned refugee toddler. Because how would the world ever know there was a refugee crisis if the great Ai Weiwei didn’t attach his name to it? I gotta tip my cap to that Italian art critic. Enough with Ai Weiwei already.

What's so deep about the "Deep State?"

The other night I watched the Nekrasov docu-drama, "The Magnitsky Act - Behind the Scenes." It's not easy to find, but it's still out there.

For the most part, I found the "drama" to be on the cheesy side, but the most compelling viewing is when you watch Bill Browder testifying towards the end. That's not a dramatic reenactment; that's Bill Browder testifying under oath.

Bill Browder is one of those guys who seems to have the keys to the kingdom. If Bill wants an op-ed in the Globe and Mail or the New York Times, it's his for the writing. His shtick, namely being Putin's "Public Enemy #1," is popular fare here in the Nations of Virtue.

That guy testifying under oath doesn't seem too rattled. His denials, evasions, and obfuscations, as blatant as they are, he knows will never be challenged. Bill could, I suppose, tell you all about the "Deep State," but why should he have to? After all, everything is pretty much out in the open.

We choose not to see it.

The great Ai Weiwei is another wonder. How many other contemporary artists have you met on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations? None, I'll bet.

But Ai Weiwei is a reliable spewer of anti-China hyperbole, and that, not his keen insights into the human condition, is why he's a favorite of the not-so-deep state. Again, there's nothing deep about how we're manipulated. It's right there in the open.

With regard to our current crisis, ie a flu epidemic that forced us to destroy the world economy, it's not hard to connect the dots either...

Ai Wei Wei and the concept of shamelessness

Ai Wei Wei is shameless.

He can mock that wee kid dead on a beach and come up smelling of roses!

Turns out I wasn't the first to peg the great Ai WeiWei as a shameless opportunist.

Alastair Smart has done that.

Francesco Bonami has done that.

Jed Perl, David Maine, and Nitasha Dhillon have all done that... and these are all really serious people who have little or nothing in common with the pot-addled hillbilly who writes this blog.

But nevermind all that... Canada (or at least a very small slice of the Canadian elite) just honoured Ai WeiWei with the Adrienne Clarkson Citizenship Medal!

If nothing else, maybe we can establish once and for all that our "elites" don't speak for the rest of us.

The pretentious twattery of John Ralston Saul

Walls, Bridges, Homes is a series of essays written in response to the emerging global appetite for a progressive narrative around inclusion and immigration. The series frames the thematic focus of 6 Degrees Citizen Space, a forum presented by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship.

So reads the intro to a full page opinion piece by John Ralston Saul in last Saturday's Globe and Mail. The forum in question is open to the public - for a price! Yes, dear citizen, you too can witness important thinkers of "progressive" thoughts reaffirm one another's greatness! The great Ai Wei Wei will be on hand, together with a goodly slice of the Canadian literary establishment. At a mere $65 to $175 per ticket, it's a bargain, at least for the kind of people who like to name drop; "I was at a conference last week, and asked _______________ (fill in the name of your choosing, although it's obvious that the big draw here is Ai Wei Wei) to clarify their theory of ____________."

Of course, once you've paid for your ticket you're no longer involved as a citizen, but as a consumer.

So JRS (Saul has a ways to go before his initials get the same instant recognition as the initials BHL, but I'm doing my best to help raise his profile) and his wife start an "Institute," they have fund-raising forums, and the Globe and Mail donates tens of thousands in free advertising by way of a "series of essays..."

Hmm... are the people writing this ad copy also being paid for it by the Globe? No wonder they don't make money on ads anymore. The old model, wherein advertisers pay the paper, has been completely turned upside down!

Anyway, lets have a look at JRS's essay, The bridges we must build, right here at home.

The first quarter or so is an incoherent ramble about how some white Europeans invented racism, "the Westphalian model," and spread it all over the world. It's part of "our imperial inheritance," and "we took it up with enthusiasm."

Sorry, John; "we," meaning white settlers in North America, didn't take it up, enthusiastically or otherwise. We brought it with us. The colonial project was always about the dispossession of the indigenous population. There was no golden age when settler and native lived in egalitarian harmony. True, there are many examples of various First Nations having alliances of convenience with various settler groups (British, French, Spanish, Dutch) in the many wars that wracked the continent from the late fifteenth century forward, but the over-arching theme was always one of destroying the natives and stealing their land.

Saul then segues into a discussion of the "migrant crisis" that struck Europe in 2015. Apparently this crisis is due primarily to the lack of a sufficient bureaucracy within the EU to handle this population in-flow in an orderly manner. Yup, all those refugees from Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Libya would have caused nary a ripple if the EU nations had proper policies and sufficient bureaucrats. There is no hint that there might be some connection between US/NATO foreign policy in those countries and the migrant crisis.

This is of course complete bullshit. The vast majority of actual refugees are fleeing the death and destruction visited on their countries by ourselves and our allies. Suggesting otherwise is beyond dishonest; it is propaganda for a blinkered and profoundly racist world-view that seeks to shift responsibility for our crimes against humanity to unfortunate policy failures and faceless bureaucrats.

Saul wraps things up with a patronising tribute to the great comeback Canada's Indians are making. Sure, we can celebrate, if we are so inclined, the inclusion of Indian writers in the canon of the Canlit establishment, but what's that worth to a teenager in Attawapiskat?

JRS concludes with this, addressed to First Nations; "...one of the first things you do is show respect by saying thank you. That is how bridges begin to be built."

In other words, we stole your land, we destroyed your culture, we're still killing your kids, but we are deeply grateful to you.

Please appreciate our heartfelt respect.

More hokum from the great Ai Weiwei

There can be few sentient beings in the plugged-in world unacquainted with the heart-wrenching photo of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was photographed on a Greek beach some months ago.



It's a photo that resonated on many levels. It shamed many into donating to charities that have been assisting in the resettlement of refugees. Here in Canada it triggered an outcry over the foot-dragging by the Harperites in bringing refugees to this country.

But for Ai Weiwei, the picture was an inspiration.



Yes, in case you were not familiar with the refugee crisis before, now that the great Ai Weiwei has taken up the cause you have no excuse for your ignorance...

More tastless self-aggrandizing hokum from Ai Weiwei.

The million dollar Ai Weiwei challenge

Chinese artiste Ai Weiwei (#aiww) has been getting major face-time in Western media because the Lego folks denied his request for lots of free Lego blocks.

That's resulted in a tsunami of free-Lego-block offers from the gullible public across the Western World.

That's a great PR coup for Aww, but it doesn't change the fact that Ai Weiwei is a fraud and a charlatan.

Let's take a step back to Ai Weiwei's last big burst of mainstream publicity, when he had that "Straight" show touring the major art markets.

That was when major galleries around the world were featuring a pile of reinforcement rods lying on the floor. That rebar symbolized the totalitarian Chinese government's lack of caring for the people who had lost their schools in the recent earthquake, because every single piece of rebar in that exhibition came from a school that had collapsed in that earthquake.

Really?

That was bullshit then and it's bullshit now.

Here's your million dollar challenge, Mr. Ai Weiwei; let's find twenty linear feet of rebar that's been embedded in cement. (Remember, you straightened 70 miles of it for that "Straight" exhibit.) Lets hack it out of the cement and see how it piles up. I'll pay you a million dollars if it looks anything like the exhibits you had on display in Toronto and Venice a couple of years ago.

You're right, I don't have a million bucks, but I'm in no danger whatsoever of losing this bet.

The reason Lego isn't giving you free Lego blocks is because they know you're a fraud.

The hokum of Ai Weiwei

Canada's newspaper of record today features a review of an Ai Weiwei exhibition at The Art Gallery of Ontario.

According to James Adams, one of the exhibitions' highlights is Straight, which is forty tons of rebar lying on the floor of the gallery.

That's the intriguing thing about art, isn't it? When there's forty tons of rebar lying on the floor at the local welding shop it's called an accident. When it's lying on the floor of a gallery it becomes art.

Here's where the hokum comes along; after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 Ai Weiwei and his team "collected thousands of rebar rods from these (collapsed) schools, straightened them, then arranged their varying lengths into a vast carpet of rusted corrugated steel."

Apparently this is "a powerful testimony to state indifference and to the young lives cut short..."




Ya maybe, but something about this story will ring more than a little false to anyone who has ever had to straighten rebar. It can be done -sort of, but you'll never get them to pile quite that neatly after they've been bent and straightened.

Not only that, but rebar is cased in cement, so the Ai Weiwei team has meticulously disentombed each individual length from the concrete in which it had been embedded.

The Ai Weiwei travelling circus has 40 tons of rebar on view in Toronto and 150 tons at the Venice Art Beinnale which runs till November. That's almost 200 tons of earthquake-ravaged rebar that Weiwei and his team has pulled from collapsed buildings in Sichuan.

It looks like the artist and his team use an assortment of rebar diameters, but for the sake of easy math lets assume the entire exhibit consists of #5 rebar which weighs a convenient one pound per running foot. That would put 80,000 ft. of rebar on view in Toronto; 300,000 in Venice.

In total, Ai Weiwei and his team have salvaged over 70 miles of rebar from an earthquake zone, cleaned it of concrete, and straightened it?

All since 2008?

Not that we want to call Weiwei's bluff. He has become a hero of sorts in some circles for antagonizing the Chinese government, who as we all know do not love freedom and democracy nearly as much as their betters in America.

I'm guessing that for the "Straight" touring exhibit, The Artist calls up the nearest rebar supply house for his rebar needs, and none of the rebar on view in Toronto or Venice has ever been near Sichuan.