A Turn to the Many: Ai Weiwei

“Crowdsourced,” frequently recycled, made in large quantity, and easily transmittable across analog and digital borders, Ai’s art and activism mark the turn(s) of global contemporary art toward the remixing, the participatory, the media-savvy, and the socially engaged—turns that were gathering strength for more than a century but began to coalesce into powerful discourses in the 1990s.