UNIT 3 The Art Review Power 100

The current top ten are as listed:

1.       Iwan and Manuela Wirth

Major Gallerists with spaces in Zurich, London, New York, Los Angeles and Somerset

2.       Ai WeiWei

Artist and social activist, prominent in reconnecting art with issues of social and cultural value

3.       David Zwirner

The head of a New York and London gallery empire with an impressive reputation and spaces to match

4.       Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones

Directors of the Serpentine galleries, with HUO as the initiator of numerous extracurricular international art projects and exhibitions

5.       Nicholas Serota

Director of Tate

6.       Larry Gagosian

Established gallerist with 13 venues worldwide putting on museum quality exhibitions

7.       Glenn D. Lowry

Director museum of modern art (MoMA), New York

8.       Marina Abramovic

Performance-Artist-Turned-Celebrity-Inspirer-and-admirer

9.       Adam D. Weinberg

Director of the Whitney museum of American art

10.   Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Curator of the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, and the lauded Documenta 13

 

From the art review power 100 list I have decided to research further into Ai WeiWei.  He is a Chinese activist and artist born in 1957, he grew up in a military re-education camp due to his father being unfairly condemned as a criminal because of Chairman Mao’s ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign. Therefore beginning his continuous distaste of the Chinese Government.

After returning to Beijing WeiWei studies at the Beijing Film Academy, and then later joins the Stars group participating in exhibitions and protests such as the exhibition outside the China Art Gallery in 1979 which 80,000 people attended. In 1983, he moves to New York City after harsh criticism and political pressure causes the Stars group to disband. He describes his time in New York City as being exiled, he emphasises this fact by documenting his time in exile through photographs. In 1993, Ai WeiWei finally returned to his home country however he continues to criticize the Chinese Government through his work, below is an example of this where WeiWei drops a Han dynasty Urn.

 

Ai WeiWei unveiled his commission for the Unilever Series at Tate Modern in 2010: ‘Sunflower Seeds’. He demonstrates how art can help struggling towns and villages that once depended on their art forms for income. For this particular art piece, he presented millions of porcelain sunflower seeds made in the workshops of a once famous porcelain town; Jingdezhen.