One in a Few Thousand: Ai Wei Wei's Sunflower Seeds

At the beginning of the week, I thought that a visit to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern would be relegated to the realm of commonplace cultural experience. Thousands upon thousands of punters were set to sit, stroll, crunch, play, think, snooze, on the 100 million Sunflower Seeds carefully crafted for Ai Wei Wei's new art installation, as commissioned for Unilever's annual exhibit.

However, the gallery's decision to prevent members of the public from walking across the sculpture has leant my trip on Tuesday to the Tate a greater significance. It appears I am now only one in a scant few thousand.

The decision was taken, according to the Tate website, "in consultation with the artist," and I would love to have been privy to that particular conversation.

"Yo, Ai, you know that monumental piece of art that 1600 skilled artisans have been solidly working on for at least two years? The one that's meant to represent the power of people who have access to the internet in China, and therefore the growing potential for a challenge to the censorship of the state?"

"Yes..."

"Well, apparently, it gives off... er... Dust."

"Mmm."

"So, we're going to have to shut it down. With immediate effect. No one can walk over it. No one can run their fingers over the hand crafted porcelain seeds. No one can sit on it, as they would sit on a beach or a park, and spend a tranquil moment in thought. No one can traverse the border between art and the body, and find a new understanding with the simplest of tactile pleasures... Sorry about that."

Honestly. If "repeated inhalation" of dust "over a long period of time" were a problem, then just slap a time limit on the thing. Have a big ol' annoying buzzer rationing the time spent admiring the art. Enforce obligatory face masks upon the public. Give each visitor their own giant bubble, a Truman Show-esque fish bowl suctioned to their shoulders. Go on. Suffocate us.

This is a ridiculous reaction, that warrants a serious consideration of the things we value in life. To adapt the truism, a little bit of dust never hurt anyone.



Photograph: "Life Line", after Ai Wei Wei's Sunflower Seeds

Fire and brimstone fury in store for the arts under Jeremy Hunt?

"Tough" or smooth - which one of these options is it going to be for Arts funding under the new Con-Dem Nation?

According to Maev Kennedy at The Guardian, new Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt today "reassured those in the arts community who feared disproportionate cuts" with his promise: "Culture will not be singled out as a soft target."

That's reassuring indeed: but the fact that culture could even be associated with the word "soft", surely more suited to toilet tissue than an energising, powerful medium and expression of human existence, is disappointing. It's exactly the deployment of phrase that comes with the depreciation and criticism of subjects like English, or History. In times like these, surely it's the historians we look to for useful comparisons with past fiscal/governmental/societal solutions, and the literature that we love for reassurance and inspiration. (And let's not forget the excessive Media Studies-bashing. It's like hunting used to be, a condoned bloodsport. I pity the poor sixth-formers who take it, just because it interests them, only to have their future job prospects and all hope of credibility battered before they've even reached their AS Level mocks. )

The notion that the arts are "soft" should be challenged as loudly and forcefully as possible. If there's one thing that would do us good as a nation, it would be disspelling this fallacy forever. Surely Billy Elliot's balletic antics have long since provided refutation of this ignorant criticism of culture. Why reduce to squishy pulp, with one four letter word, something that provides millions (let's say, over 60 million?) in the country with creativity and stimulation every year, every month, every day?

And the idea is completely, moronically wrong, anyway. You'd have to be as dense as a tin of baked beans to see the arts as "soft", when you look at the rock-hard political and social power of writing from playwrights like Harold Pinter; poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson; novelists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman; artists like Picasso (Guernica pictured above). Why on earth was art and literature targeted by the Communist governments of China (see the fall-out after the Hundred Flowers Campaign) and Soviet Russia throughout the twentieth century? Because of the steely threat it had the potential to pose. In apartheid-throttled South Africa, literature was pinpointed for censorship, because of its power to challenge, one reason why writers like Nobel Prize-winning Nadine Gordimer were so important in the anti-apartheid struggle.

So where does that leave the arts in the face of a funding crisis, the "tough" times looming, like a suspicious Reuben Starkadder in Cold Comfort Farm, as The Stage readers have been informed today?

Hopefully not in the fire and brimstone fury predicted by preacher Amos in Stella Gibbon's novel; or relegation to an attic bedroom, doomed to mutter about what we saw in the "woodshed" for the next five years.

So please, Jeremy Hunt, do us a favour, either find a better speechwriter, or go buy a thesaurus. We don't want any more of this "soft" nonsense...

You big softie.