[via Complex]

Ai Weiwei. Still from 'Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,' 2012. (Courtesy Aiweiweineversorry.com)

Among the four artists who will represent Germany at the next Venice Biennale is Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Indian artist Dayanita Singh, South African artist Santu Mofokeng and French-German artist Romuald Karmakar round out the international team, as announced today by Frankfurt am Main's Museum für Moderne Kunst. Susanne Gaensheimer, the director of the museum and the curator of the German pavilion, said in the statement that each of the four artists has ties to the art scene in Germany and had worked there for many years.

Ai Weiwei, 2012. (Courtesy Ed Jones/AFP/GettyImages)

On the cusp of the release of the documentary about his life and work, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei published a diatribe in The Guardian against the Olympic games. Mr. Ai, who still cannot travel outside the country, explains why he withdrew from participating in the opening ceremony at the Beijing 2008 Olympics ("I only withdrew from participating in fake performances laden with propaganda"), which he says have become commercialized and have strayed from the humanistic motives that initially drove the ancient competition.

From the story:

I don't believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games, it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy. The state and the Olympic committee failed to take a position on many major social and political issues. Afterwards, the state tightened its controls; China became a police state. "Friendship, fair play, glory, honour and peace": the Olympic slogan is an empty one.

But Mr. Ai later expressed a sunnier outlook for the upcoming London games:

I am interested in seeing what the 2012 Olympics has done to London, but I am not free to travel. If I were free, I'd like to see how people will respond to the event, and how members of a different society, living in different social conditions, will participate in the Games. I don't know how London will cope, but I believe it will be more relaxed than Beijing. In London, the people will be able to participate in and celebrate the joy of the Games.

Ai Weiwei, 'Circle Of Animals/Zodiac Heads' at Somerset House in May, 2011 in London. (Courtesy Getty Images)

On the heels of the disappointing—albeit unsurprising—denial of artist and activist Ai Weiwei's appeal against Beijing tax authorities, there arrives the comparably happy news that his monumental installation, Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, will be unveiled at Princeton University on Aug. 1, where it will have a year-long run. The exhibition is sponsored by the Princeton University Art Museum and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which has invited Mr. Ai to the school to participate in a series of events on Wednesday, Oct. 10.

The 12 sculptures will be given a noble home in Scudder Plaza, in front of Robertson Hall, the site of the Wilson School. It has previously been displayed in many cities across the world including Sao Paolo, London, Taipei and New York, where in May 2011, just two months into Mr. Ai's detainment on tax evasion charges, it was installed at the Pulitzer Fountain across from the Plaza Hotel.

Each of the 12 bronze figures that make up Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads represents a sign of the zodiac and is roughly four feet high—10 feet including its marble base—and weighs 1,000 pounds. The sculpture is a re-envisioning of a historical work that was commissioned by an emperor of the Qing dynasty, designed by Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione in the mid-18th century and erected at an imperial retreat outside Beijing. These works were looted when France and Britain invaded China in 1860. Given their history, the works raise issues of repatriation, shared cultural heritage and democratization of public space, bread and butter themes for the Mr. Ai.

"We are delighted to have Ai Weiwei's work on campus for the coming year, work that is at once playful and provocative, and through which we can consider the role of the visual arts in the politics of resistance," said James Steward, director of the art museum, in a statement.

The sculptures are on loan to the Ivy League school by the family of an alumnus who has asked to remain anonymous. Given the Mr. Ai's precarious status, it seems unlikely he'll be free to travel to meet the invitation by Princeton. But here's hoping.

A work from Ai Weiwei's "Study in Perspective" series, taken between 1995 and 2003. (Courtesy the artist)

Producers of the film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which documents the life and plight of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, have launched a campaign across social-networking platforms with the hashtag #RaiseYourFinger to create buzz in anticipation of the film’s release—it opens in New York on July 27. The producers are inviting fans of Mr. Ai to submit photographs of themselves raising their middle-finger “to symbols of injustice.”

The Los Angeles Times reports on the campaign, which is a tribute to Mr. Ai’s "Study in Perspective" series, in which he photographed himself raising his middle finger to various seats of cultural and political power in various cities around the world, such as Paris, Washington, D.C., and Beijing.

From the article:

Participants are asked to submit their photos via Facebook or Twitter. The photos will be assembled into a mosaic and given to Ai upon his release, scheduled for June 22. Given that Ai's recent history with the Chinese government included 81 days of incarceration (as documented in the film), that release date remains a cliffhanger of its own.

Still from 'Art in the 21st Century' (Courtesy PBS)

Tonight, Art in the 21st Century, the Peabody Award-winning television series which profiles 13 artists in four hour-long episodes, premieres on PBS at 9:00 p.m. EST. This season, the show—grouped into the episodes "Change," "Balance," "History" and "Boundaries"—will feature performance artist Marina Abramovic, art collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus, known for its carnivalesque installations (like the one it created for a 2008 exhibition at Deitch Projects), abstract artist Lynda Benglis, whose brightly-colored sculptures in poured latex and foam were exhibited at the New Museum last year, outspoken artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei and Sarah Sze who will represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

As part of the Access '12 initiative, a worldwide campaign to give wide access to contemporary art and artists through a proliferation of public screenings and events, you can catch a screening at various venues across the country. In New York, there will be screenings at NYU on April 18, the Studio Museum in Harlem on April 22 and 29 and Brooklyn Artists Gym on May 11. If you can't make it out to one of those, you can also host your own screening.

As the show will be affected by the NEA's recent announcement that it will cut funding on several documentary series, including this one, which has received support from it in the past, the fate of the program is unknown.

Sarah Sze's installation on the High Line, 'Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat).' (Photo by schmuela/Flickr)

The International Association of Art Critics' United States chapter announced yesterday the 24 winners of its 2011 awards. The New York Times first reported the news. Voted on by the 400 members of the organization, the citations are made for first and second place in 12 different categories, with three categories specially addressing New York, which were decided as follows:

Best Show in a Commercial Gallery in New York
1. Christian Marclay, "The Clock," at Paula Cooper Gallery
Producer: Paula Cooper Gallery
2. "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour Fou," Gagosian Gallery
Curators: John Richardson and Diana Widmaier Picasso

Best Monographic Museum Show in New York
1. "Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective," at the Whitney
Curators: Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky
2. "Glenn Ligon: AMERICA," at the Whitney
Curator: Scott Rothkopf

Best Thematic Museum Show in New York
1. "On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century," at MoMA
Curators: Connie Butler and Catherine de Zegher
2. "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936," at the Guggenheim
Curators: Kenneth E. Silver, assisted   by Helen Hsu, and Vivien Greene as curatorial advisor

New York dominated the category for best project in a public space, with Sarah Sze's High Line installation (curated by Lauren Ross) and Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals project at the Pulitzer Fountain (organized by Larry Warsh/AW Asia) taking first and second place, respectively.

The awards will be presented at Asia Society, on the Upper East Side, on Monday, April 2. The full list is available on AICA-USA's website.

Film still from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

The award-winning documentary on international artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, is scheduled to be released this summer by Sundance Selects, which made an announcement via Twitter yesterday.

The summer release is intended to fall in line with Ai Weiwei's first trip outside China. The artist was arrested last April on charges of tax evasion and detained by Chinese authorities for 81 days, only to be released with a tax fine of some $2.3 million, and held on house arrest until this summer.

The film explores the "inside story" of the outspoken artist who became a global phenomenon when he put his life on the line and began revealing facts about the 2008 earthquake that the news was refusing to reveal. Since then he's been avidly blogging and Tweeting his views connecting himself evermore to the international community.

"Do you think you're becoming a brand?" Mr. Weiwei is asked in the film's trailer. "Yeah," he replies. "It happened to be. Brand for liberal thinking and individualism."

The film, which made its debut at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance, documents Mr. Weiwei's international shows, like the Munich exhibition "So Sorry," as well as protests that Ms. Klayman attended and filmed, such as the "1,001 Chairs" event in New York. While the film covers his detention and the surrounding story, it was begun three years ago.

"The movie is about these last three years, you know," Ms. Klayman told The White Review in an interview she did during post-production for the film, "and the last three years he has not been a political detainee. But I’m just grateful that I’m in a position to keep his story in people’s minds, since I spent enough time with him that I think I have a really good feel for him."

Last year's Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Peter Zumthor. Courtesy The Guardian.

Architects Herzog & de Meuron, along with artist Ai Weiwei, will design the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington in 2012. The group collaborated back in 2008 to build the so-called "Bird's Nest" stadium in Beijing for the Olympic games held there.

According to the Financial Times, they "have proposed excavating a hole in the park and letting it fill with London rain."

The Serpentine Pavilion is built each year as a "temporary adjunct" to the Serpentine Gallery. According to FT, Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei:

"liken their role to that of archaeologists. The hole will be capped by a glass roof which echoes the outlines of former pavilions but can also be converted into a dance floor for the Serpentine’s famous fundraising summer party."

Herzog & de Meuron are pretty busy right now. They are converting the oil storage tanks at the Tate Modern into art spaces in London, and remodeling the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Meanwhile, Ai Weiwei's show of sunflower seeds just closed last week at Chelsea's Mary Boone gallery.

Spot paintings by Damien Hirst at Gagosian. (Photo by Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images)

Last week, for the first time ever, a single show opened in all 11 of Larry Gagosian’s galleries, from New York to Geneva to Hong Kong, simultaneously. The show comprises more than 300 of Damien Hirst’s Spot paintings, the world’s most expensive wall paper.

Encompassing a full range of both mass-market and couture shapes and sizes—the portrait, the circle, the Guernica, the right triangle, the Mondrian lozenge—and named after pharmaceuticals, the medical-white canvases are decorated with perfectly round, appealingly candy-color spots, which are usually organized on a square grid that pushes right up to the edges, but are occasionally cut off, especially in the larger sizes, and once or twice are arranged in overlapping, fan-shape mosaic patterns. The colors, although sticking to a narrow, consistent palette, do not strictly repeat in any one painting, and they’re so precisely applied that the spots look like stickers, the kind used for color coding files. Even the white backgrounds stop perfectly short at the edges: These are paintings with hospital corners.

Produced according to a set of conventions that amount to neither an artistic idiom nor even a design concept, but instead constitute a shtick—a clever, easy-to-understand-and-describe, emotionally empty and unchallenging shtick—the paintings are pleasant enough to look at but wouldn’t seem worth talking about except for the fact of their staggering success. Mr. Hirst draws a consistent tide of vitriol, and some of it probably expresses simple resentment at being asked to have a reaction to something so essentially indifferent. Some of it may also be despair at the subtle conceptual problem of acknowledging something as ubiquitous as corporate gray carpeting without conceding it any undue moral or esthetic importance.

But another part of the vitriol is an equally natural resentment of the crushing and soulless domination of money. Painters have always painted wealth according to the standards of their times. Van Eyck put his patrons in expensive fabrics and furs, and those big lacy collars that Rembrandt used weren’t cheap either. Andy Warhol, mascot of industrial democracy, painted the value created by manufacturing and advertising during the long, postwar American boom. What has changed is the kind of money we’re talking about.

Every dot in Mr. Hirst’s paintings, like every dollar bill with a serial number printed on it, is nominally unique, but practically exchangeable for any other dot. Individual paintings have their different shapes and arrangements, but as commodities in a fully financialized, corporatized economy, they aren’t merely exchangeable for some number of dots—they are nothing but some number of dots. Increasingly they’re moving to Asia, but the best of them—with “best” being defined quantitatively—are still in New York: The single painting with the most dots, more than 25,000 of one millimeter each, and the longest painting, at 50 feet, are both hanging in Gagosian’s 21st Street gallery, while the one with the largest spots, at five feet in diameter, is on 24th Street. And they borrow their Pop, Op and Minimalist art historical references for the same reason and in the same way that currency designed and printed with computers is still made to look engraved: because to work as money, money has to look the way most people think money looks.

In Van Eyck’s time, in Rembrandt’s time and even, though to a much lesser degree, in Andy Warhol’s time, money looked like a complex confluence of labor and commodities with social and esthetic values. But President Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, making the dollar a fiat currency, in 1971; and in the 1980s, banks began merging and markets financialized and internationalized; and when, in 1986, Damien Hirst made his first Spot painting, he inaugurated an age of fiat art.

Speaking of large numbers of identical elements assembled in a way that lets the viewer’s capacity for finding patterns in randomness substitute for decision-making on the part of the artist, Ai Weiwei’s artwork Sunflower Seeds recently went up at Mary Boone. That is, went down: thousands of quite realistic-looking ceramic sunflower seeds, white with faded black stripes, handmade in a city in northern China known for its ceramics, and arranged, in this case—Sunflowers appeared in a much larger version at Tate London in 2010—in a long, low, truncated square pyramid shape on the gallery floor. Some of the things a piece like this might be about, if it had any content as well considered as its impeccable execution and branding, are the relationship between the grueling human cost of China’s rapidly developed industrial economy and its increasing cultural and political weight in the world; the way that individual acts of labor disappear into wholes that are nonetheless made of nothing but those acts; the relativity of value judgments (are they husks or are they seeds?) and the possibility of making something new from the discards of the old; money, again; the beguiling and mysterious weirdness of systems, like language and art, in which the meaning of any single point is entirely determined by its relationship to other points; and something like “in union there is strength.” These were The Observer’s first five ideas, anyway, but the appeal of work like this is that every viewer is at total liberty to come up with his or her own.