If you think about it, it’s not that hard to predict what will happen if you try to mess with Ai Weiwei: you’ll lose. That’s certainly the fate that befell a high-profile Danish car distributor and dealer this week, as evidenced by the culmination of a legal battle that’s been brewing for more than a year. See, back in 2017, Volkswagen (VWAPY) released an advertisement, which was published more than 200,000 times, that featured a Weiwei piece called Soleil Levant in the background. The work was installed at Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg for the duration of summer 2017, but Weiwei had never intended for it to serve as a tacit backdrop for a reasonably priced station wagon.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Soleil Levant functions as a commentary on the refugee crisis, and consists of 3,500 fluorescent orange life jackets that, piled on top of each other, exploded from a stoic brick structure as though the building were bursting at the seams. Weiwei alleged that Volkswagen had put his work in their advertisement without first receiving his permission (which he never would have granted in the first place), and on Wednesday, a Danish court ruled in the artist’s favor and awarded him 1.75 million Danish Krone, or $262,952.
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“This market-related exploitation of Ai Weiwei’s artwork was clearly contrary to the considerations and thoughts which was behind the work and the detailed content of the work,” the Danish Court of Glostrup declaimed as part of its decision. In a world where everything and anything appears to be for sale, and artists capitulate to the idea of capsule collections, luxury branding and merchandising with unforeseen ease, Weiwei’s resistance to the riptide feels significant.
Here is an artist who is uncomfortable with the current status quo that demands that creative people surrender to the idea that everything has to be monetized. Hopefully, others will abide by his example.
