Last week, my wife and I visited the Ai Weiwei exhibition, “The Liberty Of Doubt“, being held at the Kettle’s Yard art gallery in Cambridge. For those who are unfamiliar with Ai Weiwei, the best way to describe him is as an artist and activist: his recently published memoir, 1,000 Years Of Joys And Sorrows, is a wonderful book, combining a potted history of China from the early 20th century up to the current day with recollections from his father’s and his own life.
The art on display is definitely contemporary and, in some cases, quite challenging: representations in marble of such everyday items as a Styrofoam takeaway box, iPhone case and even a sex toy tested my art appreciation mettle! However, the skill with which these objects are rendered is unquestionable and the ambition of some of the pieces is on a scale that can best be described as mind blowing. His “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” at this exhibition (depicted above behind the artist), rendered in thousands of Lego pieces, is both ingenuous and controversial.
But as well as being a wonderfully inventive creative, billed as China’s foremost living artist, Ai Weiwei stands apart from his peers because of his outspoken defence of human rights, and in particular his championing of free speech and expression. As a man who says what he believes and refuses to be quiet he has, for many decades, been in conflict with the Chinese Communist Party (he currently lives in Portugal, though keeps a base in Cambridge, where his son goes to school, and a studio in Berlin). That conflict has not come without a personal cost, one that most of us would be unwilling to pay. He has been beaten by the police, severely enough to have suffered brain damage (in fact, one of his new pieces in the exhibition is a representation of the MRI performed after the beating), and he has been held, initially without charge but then on the grounds of tax evasion, in conditions of extreme confinement and loss of all personal autonomy. We can say honestly that he has suffered for his art.
And then there’s COVID-19. Given his pronouncements on the origins of the virus (it’s “obvious it isn’t natural… it’s something that leaked”) and his unabashed comments about vaccine mandates (“For or against the vaccine should be individuals’ autonomous decision, made for themselves and according to their social interaction, so society does not have the right to make vaccine compulsory”) it’s clear that his commitment to natural human rights is unwavering. Ever the individualist, Weiwei made his position about personal autonomy clear: “Regardless of the type of society, individuals are entitled to accurate information and then they can voluntarily collaborate with the Government or not. This decision should belong to individuals.” These statements are more than simply words, they drive his art which, in turn, appears as explicit and public manifestations of his commitment to freedom. Pieces showcased in the current exhibition include Handcuffs and Marble Toilet Paper (yes, it is a roll) which he made in 2020 as a “symbol of panic and distrust”.
So, given the totality of Weiwei’s output, the sheer essence of the man, it was extraordinary to witness the behaviour of the public while in the galleries. Nearly 100% of those we saw were wearing masks. While viewing the work of a man who has spent his life poking the bear of authority, and whose work is deeply political and celebrates the rights of the individual, the visitors seemed oblivious to the irony of sporting the most public expression of coercion and compliance. Perhaps these masked admirers of Ai Weiwei the artist hadn’t made the connection with Ai Weiwei the activist and lockdown sceptic; or they felt uncomfortable not demonstrating their membership of the cult of conformity (or perhaps they didn’t care). Either way, the cognitive dissonance was strong and left my wife and I both amused and frustrated, yet bemused: why should Cambridge, a highly esteemed centre of learning and academic excellence, be so full of fearers, adherents of the Cult of Covid and the useless face mask? It’s almost as if there’s an inverse relationship between IQ and old-fashioned common sense.
For those not familiar with Ai Weiwei, this is his life.
Born in 1957, in Beijing, his father, the poet Ai Qing, was labelled a “rightist” in 1958 and Ai and his family were exiled, first to Heilongjiang, in north-eastern China, and then soon after to the deserts of Xinjiang, in north-western China close to the Borth Korean border.
Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Ai Qing was rehabilitated and the family moved back to Beijing. Ai enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy and was one of the original members of the ‘Stars’ group of artists.
He moved to the United States in 1981, living in New York between 1983 and 1993. He briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design. In New York, Ai would discover the works of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Returning to China in 1993 to care for his ailing father, Ai contributed to the establishment of Beijing’s East Village, a community of avant-garde artists. In 1997, he co-founded the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), one of the first independent art spaces in China.
He began to take an interest in architecture in 1999, designing his own studio house in Caochangdi, on the northeast edge of Beijing. In 2003, Ai started his own architecture practice, FAKE Design. In 2007, as a participant of documenta 12, Ai brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel as part of his Fairytale project. In 2008, for the Beijing Olympics, Ai and the Swiss architecture team of Herzog and de Meuron designed the National Stadium .
In 2010, Ai covered the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds.
In 2011, Ai was arrested on charges of tax evasion, jailed for 81 days, and then released. The Government kept his passport and refused him any other travel papers.
In 2012, Ai Weiwei was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent by the Human Rights Foundation.
In 2015, following the return of his passport, Ai moved to Berlin where he maintained a large studio in a former brewery. He lived in the studio and used it as the base for his international work.
He was awarded the Ambassador of Conscience Award by Amnesty International for his actions in support of the defence of human rights.
In 2019, he announced he would be leaving Berlin, saying that Germany is not an open culture. In September 2019, he moved to live in Cambridge, England.
As of 2021, Ai lives in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. He still maintains a base in Cambridge, where his son attends school, and a studio in Berlin. Ai says he will stay in Portugal long-term “unless something happens”.
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In reality, the next mini ice age has begun?
We are due one!
Global boiling,..the doom sayers may soon wish it was true!
Could it be all the wind turbines cooling things down like giant fans?
Interesting idea, they must cool the air by the extracted energy. Remember Boyles Law P1*V1/T1 = P2*V2/T2. If the velocity reduces due to energy extraction, and P is constant (as it pretty much is) temperature must also fall!
V1 and V2 are volumes not velocities.
Don’t supposed anyone would like to buy 6 large unopened Damart Thermolactyl vests I bought in preparation for the last ice age scare the scientists forecast in the 70s.
Maybe we’ve gone too far in reducing our CO₂ output? Perhaps we need to burn a bit more coal to help warm the planet?
(joking)
Not joking
historical co2 measurements have always been higher than the current levels!
Joking in that I don’t think burning more coal will help to warm the planet.
Still worth a try
, sooner have a nice fire than a heat pump!
You shouldn’t joke: an ideal level of atmospheric CO2 (for plants and animals, including humans) is probably more like 1000 ppmv, more than twice the current relatively impoverished level.
‘The Science’. ‘Settled’. ‘Act Now’. ‘Tipping points’. Arctic has melted in
2010, 2014, 2017, 2020, okay okay in 2560. All the polar bears aredyingvastly increasing in population….New York will be under water in1995, 2015, well you know whenever.The religion of Science and fake studies and endless propaganda. Follow. That. Money.
I fully expect Labour to be shoved out of office within three years; we are way overdue a bad winter. A fair few dead pensioners will see them off and will also kill the Climate Lie.
In the bottom corner of one of my Windows machines it claims tomorrow will be approaching the hottest ever 28 August. Come on, this is the week my family and I went on holiday when I was a kid and it was always T-shirt and outdoor swimming weather! You’d have to be incredibly stupid and have lived in a dark, dank cave all your life to believe this sort of bullshit.
35 years since the “Winter of discontent”.
Go back a further 5 years and you Eyebrows Healey crawling off to the IMF for a handout to prop up the Labour run UK and yet this morning Two Tier Kier has been blathering that we have never had it so bad as now while our economy outstrips all of Europe and most of the G7. Mind you, he will soon put a stop to that with Robot Reeves and Ranting Rayner.
Unfortunately I don’t think things will be bad enough in 3 years. Parts of the UK will probably have had a few power cuts by then (possibly even causing a few deaths) which will have been blamed on the evil Tories. The lower/middle class Labour voters will still be admiring the efforts being made to increase their wages and blame the soaring inflation including energy/food/services costs on the evil Tories. I think it will take longer for people to realise that worse rather than better is coming down the pipeline ever faster with Sir Keir’s puppet masters in charge.
To an extent people will be right to be blaming the evil Tories. They committed the country to Net Zero when they were the government.
All voted for by Labour, the worst cheek of the same Globalist arse!
And they both use the same orifice for their policy outpourings.
A mate of mine believed in MMCC. Talybont-On-Usk is a small village outside Brecon and has a canal. He said because he remembers the canal frozen as a kid, and not so much these days, that is evidence of MMCC. And he said that a flight to Glasgow shouldn’t be cheaper than by car or Train. That may be something to do with the rail network!
I suppose having Radio 4 on permanently in his Jeep would play a part in his World view.
This really needs the same criticism as the claims from the other camp: Was any of these plunges significantly outside of the expected variability? If not, all these temperature movements in either direction are non-events, ie, temperatures changing up and down and then up again and again down in the way they always do. The second graph indicates a total range of 3.5⁰C, that’s less than the temperature difference between inner London and the countryside outside of the city and that’s something people barely notice, if at all.
The point is – we were told the oceans were heating at an unprecedented rate… It’s worse than we thought! ™️.
The climate realists have been pointing out ocean warming and cooling is not unusual, cyclic, natural so no this doesn’t need the same criticism.
The climate swindlers are following the basic COVID pattern of attaching sensational headlines to occurences which are either non-events or entirely fictional¹. Articles like this implicitly validate this reporting about by employing similar sensational wording to describe other kinds non-events. At least, that’s what I very strongly suspect because neither party provides the necessary data to assess the relevance of the temperature variations it’s highlighting. This is either shoddy science or shoddy science reporting — even J. Random Social Scientist provides information about the standard deviation of the data he employs.
It’s obvious why the climate climacterians do this: They’re trying to subdue a largely mathematically aliterate population with endless and voluminous bullshit barrages. But that’s not an excuse for their critics to engage in the same kind of nothing-slinging, firstly because, as I’ve already hinted at, this suggests that something sensational is going on now and thus, what happened to happen before was equally sensational despite this simply isn’t the case. Secondly, because they should hold themselves to higher standards, ie, educate the uneducated instead of fooling the clueless.
¹ As reported in a German web publication about ‘weather’ yesterday: Current climate simulations predict that, depending on where you are in the Pacific area, it might either rain a lot or not rain at all at times during the course of the 21th century. Therefore, we must … !!!! Not much expertise needed to come up with a prediction like this.
No mention by anyone (not even Chris) of the globally-censored Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption which, by a baffling coincidence, happened just before the unprecedented 2023 warming of the oceans and the unprecedented current spike in global tropospheric temperatures, quite different in magnitude and duration from any recently recorded powerful El Nino, e.g. 1998 and 2016. Just look at it:
.
Chris has mentioned this in a previous article last year entitled “Hunga Tonga Volcano is “Most Likely” Cause of Recent Warm Temperatures”.
Link – https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/26/hunga-tonga-volcano-cause-of-recent-high-temperatures-says-scientist
You are right to say that it is globally censored – very difficult to find any up to date analysis of the 10-13% volume of water vapour sent into the stratosphere and any sort of expectation as to how that will be returned to the surface of the planet and over what period of time. We need to keep mentioning it. Thank you for doing so.
Ofcourse it isn’t just called global warming now. So temperatures are not so important to warmist’s unless one is recorded on a thermometer near an airport, and ofcourse then temperature is all the rage again and it is evidence we are all going to fry.
— Yes today they call it “climate change” so that anything whatsoever that happens can be blamed on humans whose standard of living needs to drastically reduced by the globalist technocrats no one voted for.
It’s still “climate change” – innit?
So the Jeremiahs will have to switch back to the “new ice age” chestnut
My parents own a house on the north coast of Scotland. I go swimming in the sea when I visit. It is usually pretty damn cold, but not painfully so. This year (and I have swum a few times this month), it has been painfully cold. The lochs aren’t as bad, just their normal coldness, but the sea is really cold this year.
Make sure not to go cold-water swimming alone, because it can cause “Transient Global Amnesia”, as experienced by Dr. Michael Mosely once in Britain while cold-water swimming with his doctor wife, and probably again in Greece, after which his wife mistakenly allowed him to wander off alone in the searing heat.
Sea temperature and thermal expansion is a significant factor in sea level rise. It is thought that 75% of the sea level rise in the 20th century was down to thermal expansion.
If there is now any sort of reduction in sea temperature then presumably there will be a slow down in the rate of sea level rise?
But as others have pointed out this climate change business seems to have moved a long way away from facts and rational analysis, as some dodgy journalist once said, don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good (in this case ludicrous) story.
“Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news”
They will no doubt focus on something else. They will switch to the man made fires as evidence of MMCC.
That famous line from a Climategate email springs to mind. –“We can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t”. —–But ofcourse had those emails not been hacked back in 2009 then the public would never have known that the “scientists” knew the earth was not warming but never told us. The truth is that despite all the claims of “settled science” and projections from failed models of future warming, there are no scientists or experts who know what the climate will be doing in 50 or 100 years, and the “travesty” is that they keep telling that they do know.
They don’t really. They’re extremely careful to stay in the subjunctive all the time (another property shared with COVID propaganda), it’s alway about stuff which could or might happen. Fundamentally, that’s the same appeal to ignorance endlessly overused for the pandemic: Point at something sufficiently complicated that many people don’t understand it and start whispering about the horrible future possibilities this might entail in the hope that people get scared by dangers of the great unknown. In case someone gets called for out that, he can – just like SPI-M – always claim that nobody was making predictions, just highlighting possible future scenarios.
Yes there is plenty of “what if” and “maybe”, but we still get told that what we do as humans can be adjusted to keep the “global temperature” from rising by more than 1.5 C. —-Now that is a pretty accurate piece of “settled science” is it not?——-To control the temperature of the whole world to within the nearest degree. This is not science at all, it is globalist bulls..t
Obviously. Especially considering that this is mostly just western Europe and the USA and nothing anyone does in Europe will have a meaningful influence on global CO₂ emissions. If we’re doomed unless they fall significantly, then, we’re doomed. If the climate show hysterics would really believe in that, they’d be focussing on India and China.
Climate Change caused by our CO2 emissions sounds good to the average person who is too busy with work and family life. They are led to believe this is all about science and scientists warning the government about a dangerous problem, and then the government have no choice but to act. —-It is just like when a very good friend of mine said to me “Why would they say there was global warming if it isn’t true”? —I tried to explain something about why, and the politics involved but propaganda is a very powerful tool and it is hard for my friend and for anyone else to listen to me instead of “all the world’s scientists”.
Ah, ‘…..scientists are seemingly clueless….’
Add that to the ‘doctors are baffled‘ one.
Jim NR Dale cannot hang his head in shame. He has no shame. He makes too much money for such things to get in his way. Appalling, yes, and dangerous man.
When I was in school back in the 60’s it was all about entering another ice age.
So according to the top graph, we have gone from the warmest to the second warmest temperature for the time of year?