Art Market Escape Ai Weiwei

Mr. Ai “has been a naughty boy,” said artist Liu Xiaodong, to chuckles from the audience. Artist Xu Bing’s comment on Ai was even more succinct. “As Liu said, he does not agree with my approach to art. And so my art, Liu’s art, and Ai Weiwei’s art are very different,” Mr. Xu said.



As a rule, artists hate to talk about money, how much their art is worth or how the marketplace might influence their creative muse. But two of the artists — Messrs. Fischl and Liu — are what Asia Society moderator Melissa Chiu called “market darlings.”

In the 1980s, everyone talked about the “art world,” he said, while today the talk is of an “art market.” Many in the Chinese art world lament the commercial success of artists like Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi and Mr. Liu — all three of whom ranked among the top 20 contemporary artists world-wide in auction revenue in 2010, according to Artprice — for inspiring younger generations of artists to think of the industry as a way of striking it rich. The goal was to preserve an artist’s integrity, he said.

http://blogs.wsj.com

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