In the May 21, 2014 issue of the Hyperallergic Newsletter (http://hyperallergic.com), Jillian Steinhauer reports that Grayson Earle has created an online game called “Ai Weiwei Whoops!” (http://aiweiwhoops.net) in which you are invited to drop and break vases whose digital images look like Ai Weiwei’s painted Han Dynasty urns. When you enter the field of the game, your mouse arrow becomes a vase which a simple click sends crashing to the ground. At that point another vase pops up. When the vases hit the floor, they make a shattering sound and send pixels flying. For each broken vase, you rack up “approximate property damage” of somewhere between $900,000 and $1.1 million. While this game is fun and cathartic (I tried it), is it desensitizing us to the tragedy of the willful destruction of works of art?
2 thoughts on “It is a fun game to play, but is it desensitizing us?”
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I think the main issue is that Ai Weiwei himself had vandalized an arguably more important cultural artifact–yet this action was lauded by the art world. A two-thousand year old Han Dynasty urn, in fact. So we see that a line has been drawn, but with regards to what? Clearly the commercial value of art is steeped in a strange socially-constructed paradigm that assigns arbitrary ethics to its perceived sphere of influence.
I agree with you on this. See my Conservators Converse post of February 27, 2014.