The Art Angle Podcast: Ai Weiwei on the Coronavirus, China, and Art’s New Role

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

Ai Weiwei is not shy about tackling the big issues. Despite
winning international acclaim for his interdisciplinary,
boundary-pushing art, the Chinese-born artist is better known in
some circles for his activism—though in his estimation, the two are
inextricably linked. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak
varying degrees of havoc around the globe, Ai has increasingly
turned his attention toward how the illness is exposing the
failures of governments and aggravating the geopolitical fault
lines between world powers.

Although China, where the outbreak began in December 2019, seems
to have contained the virus sufficiently to begin easing its way
back to some kind of normalcy, serious questions remain about how
transparent Xi Jinping’s regime has been about the disease. After
being detained, beaten, and surveilled by party officials in 2011
in response to his investigative work, Ai
knows better than most how the tentacles of China’s authoritarian
government can accost citizens willing to criticize the state. He
believes that here, too, the bureaucracy’s unwillingness to admit
its own errors has created disastrous consequences for others—this
time, the world over. But he also believes that leading Western
nations, especially the United States, bear some of the blame for
being too accommodating of China for too long, all in pursuit of
profit.

This week on the podcast, Ai Weiwei calls in from Cambridge, UK,
where he is safely ensconced with his son and girlfriend, to
discuss the pandemic, its effects on global politics, and how
artists can contribute to a world in turmoil.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)

Listen to Other Episodes:

The Art Angle Podcast: How Photography Is Being
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The Art Angle Podcast: The Unbelievable True Story
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The Art Angle Podcast:
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The Art Angle Podcast: Why Art and Fashion Need
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The Art Angle Podcast: What Does an Art Scene Look
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The Art Angle Podcast: How an Art-Dealing Prodigy
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The Art Angle Podcast: Is the Museum of Ice Cream
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The Art Angle Podcast: What Is Saudi Arabia Trying
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The Art Angle Podcast: How Hollywood Finally Fell
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Coronavirus, China, and Art’s New Role appeared first on
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