Europe

if this was the article, i totally understand zeit.

ai wei wei is boring and prude. i never warmed up for his superficial art. basically jeff koons but with a selfrightous moral highground.

but i always thought he would offer something else. he is a well known human rights activist after all. then i read this lazy observation. maybe i thought there has to be more to the man than his art, he is worldwide known as a critic of nations and governments after all.

so i looked into his positions and "art". the only word that sounded sincere was that he doesn't understand art. the other stuff is a common ground, free from controversy. yes there is war and human rights are ignored, but ask yourself the following: if you asked chatgpt for it's positions on human rights or an idea for controversial art - would the answer differ much from ai wei weis works?

My expectation for this article was very different, maybe because I'm not at all familiar with the author. This seemed like a loose collection of aphorisms and not really like anything I'd lump in with what I generally think of as "journalism". Take this for example:

Bureaucracy is not merely sluggish. It is a cultural scorn. It rejects the possibility of dialogue. It insists that ignorance, codified into policy, no matter how wrong and inhumane it is, remains the best resistance against social mobility, against moral motion. In such a society, hope is not misplaced. It is extinguished.

What does this mean? What does it refer to? Which bureaucratic processes specifically? This could have been a useful think-piece, but it doesn't contain any actual information. It's more... like a word-picture for feelings.

Maybe the ZEIT editors also had different expectations?

When public events of great consequence — such as the Nord Stream Pipeline bombing — are met with silence from both government and media, the silence itself becomes more terrifying than any atomic bomb.

It is interesting how people remember things differently - I really do not think that there was silence from the public or government in regards of the Nord Stream bombings. Yes, there weren't any demonstrations or riots on the street, but silence?

Since I don’t speak the language, I can only imagine that the young people coming to Berlin would talk about [...]

Pretty brave presenting a list of pretty harsh statements without explanations about the German state and its people when not even understanding what they are actually talking...

Not really surprised that Zeit stepped back from publishing the article.

I fully understand that they refused to publish this if I may say so. He is permanently contradicting himself, and this is not even the worst part.

He doesn't speak the language, but 'assumes' the young people 'coming to Berlin' (where do they come from?) are talking about clubbing? How does he make this inference?

And the Germans 'might' be 'truly the furthest from a sense of humor' which 'could be the result of their deep reverence for rationality' - an inference he apparently makes from a Mercedes-Benz ad at the airport.

And so it goes on. I mean, he is an artist and may assume whatever he wants, but I understand why they refused to publish this piece.

I live in Germany for over 6 years, and come from Russia. I don't appreciate generalisation, but some things he mentioned just ring the bell. Some Germans I met definitely fit the description, but not the others.

I don't think art here is complacent, but I also see how artists from outside of Germany (and generally, foreigners), often tune down their criticism towards Germany.

At work, my German colleagues are very sensitive if a foreigner criticizes late trains or long bureaucratic procedures. There's a notion we should be grateful, and if we don't like something, we should go back to places we like...

Germans themselves seem to be critical of their society though, so I wonder how it works from the inside.

Perhaps Ai Weiwei's point is a perspective of an outsider who's expected to express gratefulness and complacency.

Immigrant refuses to learn the language of the country he moved to and goes on to feel unwelcome. What a shame. As an immigrant living in Germany myself I'd recommend he go somewhere else.

When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.

This is more true than usual in more places than just Germany.

Seems reasonalble? I don't agree with everything, but he is not exactly wrong with his impression. And yes, Chinese restaurants in Germany suck 🤷

This rings so much for nordic countries too.