33 Artists in 3 Acts Read Online Free

first work that Ai made with the use of the Internet, recruiting volunteer travelers through his blog. When asked to look back at the stages of his career, Ai says simply that there is the art he made before he discovered the Internet and the work he created afterward.
    The audience seems evenly divided between those who find Ai exasperating and those who sit in awe. An Asian American student suggests that contemporary art in China is “an alibi for freedom” and asks Ai to comment on the “dark nature” of the art world. In the past ten years, says the artist, it is more accurate to say that the art market—not art—has prospered in China. “That is what has attracted the Western attention,” he affirms. “The art market is like the stock market except that it is smaller, so it can be controlled by an even smaller group of people.”
    Finally, an Australian who introduces himself as one of the co-organizers of the conference asks the closing question. “I applaud you for your unstinting commitment to principle,” he says, then wonders whether Ai is “perversely useful to China?” Over the past year, particularly since Ai has become more belligerently political in his blog, people have been wondering how he can get away with being so outspoken. Theories have abounded. First, people thought he was American. So he posted a copy of his Chinese passport. Then they said that he must have strong family connections that give him the protection of a high-ranking party official. However, the artist claims that if he has a friend at the top, he does not know who it is.
    Ai concludes by declaring that, if he were once useful, it appears that he is no longer. A few months ago, Chinese officials closed down his blog. They have since completely erased his existence from the Internet. If you put the three characters that spell the name “Ai Weiwei” into Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, nothing comes up. It’s the same for other words, he affirms: “freedom,” “human rights,” “democracy,” and “fuck” are also unsearchable in China.

     

    Jeff Koons
    Landscape (Cherry Tree)
    2009

     
    SCENE 3
    Jeff Koons
    M ost artists in New York City worry less about censorship than reputation management. If you are in the public eye for long enough, laments Jeff Koons, your “inevitable fate” is to be “burned at the stake.” Although the analogy between artists and saints, executed for treason or heresy, appears casual, it is one that he makes regularly.
    Since 2001, Koons’s studio has been located in Chelsea, a few blocks away from Gagosian Gallery, one of the artist’s dealers. From the outside, the studio has the air of an art gallery. Its brick exterior is painted white and punctuated by four large grids of frosted glass windows. Inside, one finds a warren of offices for design and administration and workshops for painting and sculpture.
    The first stop on a Koons studio visit is a spacious open-plan room full of young people sitting in swivel chairs, staring at large Apple monitors. Gary McCraw, the artist’s longtime studio manager, has a station here. A quiet man with long straight hair and a long beard, McCraw manages Koons’s growing staff of more than 120 full-time employees. He has the same polite but oddly impervious manner as his master, who he expects will be with us in a minute. While I wait, I catch a glimpse of a new work on one of the screens, a shiny sculpture of a partially naked woman accompanied by a planter of flowers.
    Koons appears, wearing an old golf shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “ThatVenus—she’ll be eight feet high,” says the artist, who has noticed the direction of my gaze. “We’re putting a lot of care into her. See the way her dress is gathered up in her hands like vagina folds.” Wasting no time, Koons ushers me through the office to a painting studio. “I enjoy the sense of community. I don’t want to be in a room by myself all day. That’s why I created a