The fragility of the Empire

The crisis has sprayed those delirious fumaroles of Chinese art that flooded auctions of contemporary art. Brilliance’s hangover has shown the reality of that noisy clucking: everything was fashion, passing swindle, speculation. However, under the fiction stands the voice of a great artist, a cultural activist, a committed citizen, a guy prone to stepping on the limits: Ai Weiwei (Beijing, 1957), son of the great –and penalized– Chinese poet Ai Quing.