I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together.
AI WEIWEII don’t think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn’t be nervous about that.
More Ai Weiwei Quotes
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You have so many museums in the West, and so many shows, you need somebody to show the work, otherwise it’s empty.
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I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.
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Say what you say plainly, and then take responsibility for it.
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We should use this public sphere and redefine – beyond China’s borders – what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen’s privacy begins.
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Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution.
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Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China’s society is opening.
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If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?
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Democracy, material wealth, and universal education are the soil upon which modernism exists.
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Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.
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What counts in the end is what the government does.
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Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. Rulers can delay that freedom, but they cannot stop it.
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If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.
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The Internet changes the structure of society all the time — this massiveness made of individuals.
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China restricts the society’s freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals.
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I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it’s all we need.
AI WEIWEI