Ai Weiwei: I grew up in the most restrictive society. We paid so much for any gesture or show of attitude. Then I came to the West, I went to the Lesbos beach where people are dying daily, and I posed as a single child. I was confused and surprised by so many people being against this act. I want to understand why they were against it. Humans are so fixed in their ways: when to sleep, when to eat, our educational systems that teach us what we can or can’t do, all these religious reasons and fake moral structures. I don’t understand why you would set yourself up to be afraid.
On the Lesbos beach people are dying daily, not just Alan Kurdi. This criticism is so fake — a fake emotional condition they set up for one instance. Come on, thousands are dying. Maybe the one next to him was his brother. Maybe the way he was lying on the shore was different. But the media never showed his brother, stuck in the rocks just fifty meters away. Why don’t people talk about him? Why don’t they know his name? This kind of soap opera sentiment controls the mainstream mind and makes society the way it is today. Nobody cares, people only want their own emotions not to be affected, to not to be touched. They can still feel comfortable. They want to decide when they will shed tears.
IB: And yet you did this and there was an eruption of criticism.
Ai Weiwei: My response to this criticism is, ‘What the fuck? You want me to go do it again?’ But who cares about a single photograph, a single post, really? A single boat flips over and seven hundred people die. The media doesn’t care. A person drives a car into a few people in London and CNN covers it for a week; a boat flips over and complete silence. It is just so fake.
People are blind — they will never be enlightened beyond their own experience. You see many people visit Buddhist temples, but do you think they understand even a small sense of Buddhism? Do people understand anything about Buddhist philosophy? They love it, but don’t understand it. When they don’t love it, everybody abandons it. It is not that they abandon it because of the depth of their understanding; they have just become lazy and stupid.
IB: I think we have a long history of willful ignorance. But throughout the world there is also a long history of taking the voice of the poet or artist seriously. One thing that frustrates me right now is that in the United States we have many strong poets and artists voicing extraordinary truths, but we don’t see the larger public embracing them, and throughout American history they have virtually been ignored by the political elite. Why do you think this is such a characteristic of American culture?
Ai Weiwei: I can only talk about today. I don’t know the history. Today, people are overwhelmingly taken with materialism. As a result, the individual has become disassociated from the meaning of life and the concerns of humanity. I think this is one purpose of capitalism and it has been very successful in the United States. The capitalist system will not accept a life of abstract thinking in dealing with aesthetics. Reality is too strong in capitalism. It is about material possessions, money, power and status.
- The Conditions of Empathy, Ai Weiwei
On the Lesbos beach people are dying daily, not just Alan Kurdi. This criticism is so fake — a fake emotional condition they set up for one instance. Come on, thousands are dying. Maybe the one next to him was his brother. Maybe the way he was lying on the shore was different. But the media never showed his brother, stuck in the rocks just fifty meters away. Why don’t people talk about him? Why don’t they know his name? This kind of soap opera sentiment controls the mainstream mind and makes society the way it is today. Nobody cares, people only want their own emotions not to be affected, to not to be touched. They can still feel comfortable. They want to decide when they will shed tears.
IB: And yet you did this and there was an eruption of criticism.
Ai Weiwei: My response to this criticism is, ‘What the fuck? You want me to go do it again?’ But who cares about a single photograph, a single post, really? A single boat flips over and seven hundred people die. The media doesn’t care. A person drives a car into a few people in London and CNN covers it for a week; a boat flips over and complete silence. It is just so fake.
People are blind — they will never be enlightened beyond their own experience. You see many people visit Buddhist temples, but do you think they understand even a small sense of Buddhism? Do people understand anything about Buddhist philosophy? They love it, but don’t understand it. When they don’t love it, everybody abandons it. It is not that they abandon it because of the depth of their understanding; they have just become lazy and stupid.
IB: I think we have a long history of willful ignorance. But throughout the world there is also a long history of taking the voice of the poet or artist seriously. One thing that frustrates me right now is that in the United States we have many strong poets and artists voicing extraordinary truths, but we don’t see the larger public embracing them, and throughout American history they have virtually been ignored by the political elite. Why do you think this is such a characteristic of American culture?
Ai Weiwei: I can only talk about today. I don’t know the history. Today, people are overwhelmingly taken with materialism. As a result, the individual has become disassociated from the meaning of life and the concerns of humanity. I think this is one purpose of capitalism and it has been very successful in the United States. The capitalist system will not accept a life of abstract thinking in dealing with aesthetics. Reality is too strong in capitalism. It is about material possessions, money, power and status.
- The Conditions of Empathy, Ai Weiwei
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