lørdag 4. juni 2016

Ai Weiwei and Warhol, Together Again

Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, it turns out, have plenty in common.Like Warhol, Mr. Ai surrounds himself with stray cats, has a fondness for neon-tinted floral arrangements and takes pleasure in subverting hallowed cultural touchstones.

Both men have also made a mint turning everyday objects into sought-after commodities. And Mr. Ai, like Warhol, compulsively records his life and surroundings — Warhol had his tape recorder; Mr. Ai always has his iPhone, which he uses almost hourly to post a deluge of images to Instagram and Twitter. But the two men are conjoined by something more significant: They are both unrepentant iconoclasts and gleeful disrupters of art world conventions. Warhol scandalized with his soup cans in 1962; three decades later, Mr. Ai defiled neolithic Chinese pottery with tutti-frutti-colored paint, and he once famously smashed a Han dynasty urn just for the heck of it. Read more