Megaphones Made of Silence: Ai Weiwei at Odds With Power

Photograph Source: Catherine Cheng – CC BY-SA 4.0

Last October, I mentioned Ai Weiwei, but was perhaps insufficiently sympathetic. At best, his art bursts with loud, defiant, and impossible to ignore courage. He has detractors, for sure, but sometimes his Zen-like obfuscation is irresistible.

For what it’s worth, we both lived in New York beginning in 1983. He stayed there another four years after I left in 1989. Then there was Lesbos in 2015. He arrived on the Greek island soon after me...