MCLC: Ai Weiwei vase broken in local protest (3,4)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Hongjian Wang <hw001 at uark.edu>
Subject: Ai Weiwei vase broken in local protest (3)
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I respect and admire Mr. Ai's courage and resilience in art and in
advocacy, but I'm afraid I cannot buy his argument that he "can" smash an
urn that doesn't belong to other people. My heart still hurts whenever I
see the picture of Ai smashing it.  I've been really curious about the
details of law that regulates the protection of ancient relics. I still
have serious doubt that Ai has the "right" to smash it, which leads to
another question, i.e. whether Ai has the "obligation" not to smash it. I
hope this incident in Miami can bring people's attention back to Ai's act
and a further discussion of the legal boundary of artistic creation.
Mainland Chinese have smashed too many relics in too short a period of
time in recent history. I believe we should all be very sensitive to this
topic.

Best,
Hongjian Wang

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From: sean macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
Subject: Ai Weiwei vase broken in local protest (4)

I don’t agree with Caminero’s method here. I do not think his act, or
performance, is legitimized by the statements he has made so far (a press
conference was canceled, perhaps on the advice of his lawyer). But no
matter what, a work of art is determined not only by the artist/producer,
but also by the spectator. Here the spectator is a sort of competitor, so
to speak (Bourdieu might see it that way).

Personally I was surprised by Ai’s response:

“ ‘The argument does not support the act,’ Mr. Ai said. ‘It doesn’t sound
right. [Caminero’s] argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a
point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble
to destroy property that does not belong to him.’ ”

I believe in the BBC interview Ai emphasizes that the vase he breaks in
the photos belonged to him. I think it is interesting to consider a
concept of property and the implications of ownership in a discussion of
this installation, Ai’s work, and contemporary art in general.

All the best,

Sean

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/arts/design/ai-weiwei-vase-destroyed-by-p
rotester-at-miami-museum.html?hpw&rref=arts

ART & DESIGN

Ai Weiwei Vase Is Destroyed by Protester at Miami Museum

By NICK MADIGANFEB. 18, 2014

MIAMI — Officials at the recently inaugurated Pérez Art Museum Miami
confirmed on Monday that a valuable vase by the Chinese dissident artist
Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to
be an act of protest.

A spokeswoman for the museum said the incident occurred on Sunday
afternoon when a local artist walked into the waterfront museum and picked
up one of the vases in an installation of Mr. Ai’s work titled “Colored
Vases.” A guard asked the man to put it down, but instead he threw it to
the ground, smashing it, the spokeswoman said.

The police were summoned and arrested Maximo Caminero, 51. Mr. Caminero
was charged with criminal mischief and later released after posting bail.
He told reporters that he planned to hold a news conference on Tuesday
afternoon to explain his actions, but later canceled it.

Pérez Art Museum Miami, which opened with much fanfare during the Art
Basel festival here in December, published a statement on its website
saying that after the vase had been broken in the museum’s retrospective
exhibit of Mr. Ai’s work, a security team “immediately secured the
galleries and the person was apprehended.” Without mentioning Mr.
Caminero’s name, the statement said that the museum was “working with the
authorities in their investigation.”

Mr. Caminero, a native of the Dominican Republic who has long lived in
Miami, told the Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his arrest that
he had broken the vase to protest what he said was the museum’s exclusion
of local artists in its exhibits.

Mr. Ai has become China’s best-known artist and has been under intense
pressure from the authorities there to curtail his advocacy efforts, which
included a lengthy investigation he undertook into shoddy construction
that contributed to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in their
classrooms during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Mr. Ai, 56, was detained
for 81 days in 2011 on tax evasion charges, and remains subject to travel
restrictions.

Reached by telephone in China, Mr. Ai said he had initially understood the
vase to have been broken accidentally. But then he read a news report that
the vase in Miami had been deliberately smashed, and he questioned Mr.
Caminero’s expressed reason for doing so.

“The argument does not support the act,” Mr. Ai said. “It doesn’t sound
right. His argument doesn’t make much sense. If he really had a point, he
should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy
property that does not belong to him.”

Mr. Ai said he had no idea whether the vase could be fixed or whether its
loss would be covered by insurance. But he said he was not overly
distressed by the breakage. “I’m O.K. with it, if a work is destroyed,”
Mr. Ai said. “A work is a work. It’s a physical thing. What can you do?
It’s already over.”

News reports here said the vase was worth $1 million, a figure the museum
said was provided by the police as an estimate based on previous
appraisals of similar works by Mr. Ai. An official appraisal of the vase’s
value is underway, said Alina Sumajin, a spokeswoman for the museum.

A similar work, called a Group of 9 Coloured Vases, consisting of
Neolithic vases painted by Mr. Ai in 2007, sold at Sotheby’s in London in
2012 for $156,325, a price that included buyer’s premium.

Paradoxically, Mr. Caminero claims to be an admirer of his Chinese
colleague. He told the Miami New Times that he destroyed the vase “for all
the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here.”
Miami’s museums and galleries, he said, “have spent so many millions now
on international artists,” without, in his view, giving any attention to
local talent.

“It’s the same political situation over and over again,” he told the
newspaper. “I’ve been here for 30 years and it’s always the same.”

Mr. Caminero suggested that he had been inspired by one of Mr. Ai’s most
famous works, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a series of three photographs,
on exhibit here, in which he dispassionately shatters a priceless ancient
Chinese vase to make a point about valuation of art and everyday objects
as well as the fragility of cultural objects.

The Pérez museum’s description of the photographs says that the artist
dropped a 206 BCE-220 CE urn to the floor “to express the notion that new
ideas and values can be produced through iconoclasm.”
“I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance
protest,” Mr. Caminero told the New Times.

Patricia Cohen contributed reporting from New York.