No, but seriously, though — what the hell are they doing? What are those scraggly little hipsters with the Scott Schuman tattoos on their chests running around my city with the bowling-ball sized cameras and complete disregard for traffic patterns doing? Paris is officially 67 percent fashion photographers at this point, they are relegated to photographing cats and recycling bins for the most part. They must be staying to mess with me specifically. They have to be. Well, if not, then one of them, or perhaps one of you, needs to answer my very valid, reasonable questions:

• Why won’t they admit that they clearly only photograph models? I thought the point of street fashion was to take pictures of people that don’t look exactly like everyone you see in every magazine ever — when did that turn into “Oh, this model’s late for a casting call — better get a few shots of her while she’s on her way?” If I had a dollar for every person on these sites that wasn’t 6’1”, 110 pounds, and fucking beautiful — I would have, like, three dollars max.
• What the hell are these people doing? I’m sorry, but a 50-year-old Asian man wearing a Paul Smith suit, a denim jacket, a mink stole, a Louis Vuitton backpack, Air Force Ones, and shutter shades — WHERE IS HE GOING? Does he work at an accounting firm run by Kanye West and a 10-year-old girl? Is he late for an appointment with Willy Wonka at the World Bank? Seriously, this man had one thing and one thing alone on his agenda that day: Stand awkwardly on the corner of the street, smoke a cigarette, and wait for people to come take his picture.
• Where do people buy these absurd, absurd clothes? I know that a lot of it is more like moving art installations than actual clothes, but you take a picture of a chick wearing a floor-length ball gown made entirely out of Nerds Ropes and you don’t offer any explanation — like, sure, we’re all just supposed to nod along with great dignity and appreciation for art as we ignore the fact that she’s walking around an actual city in modern civilization wearing a bra shaped like a dolphin. Right, okay.
• What do people wear if they don’t have a billion dollars at their disposal? You cannot deny that 70 percent of street fashion photography is now just the most amazing, expensive, creme de la creme stuff available. It’s not like they ever just take a picture of some girl wearing an H&M cardigan in a smart, interesting way — street fashion photography essentially just shows you all the fabulous, absurdist ways you can carry that new Fendi clutch! With that Vera Wang wedding dress and coat made out of an animal only rich people know about — duh!
• Why are there only two options — extremely put together and classy, or crust punk covered with scabs and rubber bands? Apparently the only alternative to being a rich fasionista, if you want to get on style blogs, is to just stop showering for a few months and wear the same plaid shirt every day. You’re “edgy”? And “edgy” is “fashionable”?
• Where do you find these people? I walk around Paris every day — every single day — and have never once seen a woman running to catch a train while wearing an evening gown with a Hefty bag shawl and a pair of cowboy boots. I want to know where you’re finding them — is there just a farm of impeccably dressed, charming, smoking older men in semi-matching suits? Can I go to this farm?
• Why do you insist on taking pictures of size-6 women and referring to them as “curvy?” Come on, bro, that shit is so patronizing. “Look, we’re including you, too, fatties!! <3″
• How do you find sexy, impeccably dressed older people riding scooters? Where is that secret community? The day I see an older woman in five-inch heels and a floor-length skirt strap on a pink helmet and go putting around the Concorde, I will get “FASHION 4 LYFE” tattooed on my forehead. Stop just blatantly paying well-dressed older people to do fun-looking stuff. We know what their actual hobby here is — sitting outside at cafes and looking at passerby with the hatred of Dante’s Inferno.

1. Andy Warhol on Jasper Johns: 
“Oh, I think he’s great. He makes such great lunches.” 

2. Salvador Dalí on Piet Mondrian: 
“Completely idiotic critics have for several years used the name of Piet Mondrian as though he represented the sum mum of all spiritual activity. They quote him in every connection. Piet for architecture, Piet for poetry, Piet for mysticism, Piet for philosophy, Piet’s whites, Piet’s yellows, Piet, Piet, Piet… Well, I Salvador, will tell you this, that Piet with one ‘i’ less would have been nothing but pet, which is the French word for fart.” 

3. Marc Chagall on Pablo Picasso: 
“What a genius, that Picasso… It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.” 

4. William Powhida on Takashi Murakami: 
“…that hack Murakami trying to consume the market whole and ended up designing handbags…” 

5. Pierre-Auguste Renoir on Leonardo da Vinci: 
“He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.” 

6. Linder Sterling on Damien Hirst: 
“Dead butterflies, cows, horses, humans, sheep, and sharks — it reads like the inventory of a funerary Noah. How many halved calves suspended in formaldehyde does the world need? To my way of thinking, none.” 

7. Edgar Degas on Georges-Pierre Seurat: 
“I wouldn’t have noticed it except that it was so big.” 

8. Joseph Beuys on Marcel Duchamp: 
“The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated. It has become the territory of a few intellectuals, far from the life of people.” 

9. Mihail Chemiakin on Voina: 
“Many of us can draw a phallus with our eyes closed, but to create something serious? That’s hard, that needs to be studied. Anyone can be an amateur shit-doodling hooligan. It’s unpleasant and casts a shadow on all serious artists.” 

10. Frida Kahlo on the European Surrealists: 
“They are so damn ‘intellectual’ and rotten that I can’t stand them anymore… I’d rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.” 

11. Francis Bacon on Jackson Pollock: 
“Jackson Pollock’s paintings might be very pretty but they’re just decoration. I always think they look like old lace.” 

12. Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol (at a party): 
“You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work!” 

13. Alberto Giacometti on Pablo Picasso: 
“Picasso is altogether bad, completely beside the point from the beginning except for Cubist period and even that half misunderstood…. Ugly. Old-fashioned vulgar without sensitivity, horrible in color or non-color. Very bad painter once and for all.” 

14.William Blake on Peter Paul Rubens: 
“To my eye Ruben’s coloring is most contemptible. His shadows are of a filthy brown somewhat the color of excrement.” 

15. Francis Bacon on Henri Matisse: 
“I’ve never liked his things very much, except the very, very early things… I loathe them. I can never see what there is to it, with all those squalid little forms. I can’t bear the drawings either — I absolutely hate his line. I find his line sickly.” 

16. Banksy when meeting Robbo: 
“Never heard of you.” 

17. Michelangelo on Raphael: 
“Everything he knew, he learned from me.” 

18. Salvador Dalí on Pablo Picasso: 
“He finished modern art at one blow by outuglying, alone, in a single day, the ugly that all others combined turned out in several years.” 

19. J. Alden Weir on the French Impressionists: 
“I never in my life saw more horrible things. They do not observe drawing nor form but give you an impression of what they call nature. It was worse than the Chamber of Horrors.” 

20. Claude Monet on the French Realists: 
“Poor blind idiots! They want to see everything clearly, even through fog!” 

arhol on Julian Schnabel (in his diary): 
“Julian Schnabel called and said he was coming by with that rock person, Captain Beefheart. And we didn’t want him to, and then I got worried that Julian might have heard what I’d been saying about him — that he goes around to other artists’ studios to find things to copy.” 

23. Salvador Dalí on Paul Cézanne: 
“I began a happening in New York by announcing in front of three thousand spectators that Cézanne was a catastrophe of awkwardness — a painter of decrepit structures of the past. I was applauded, principally because nobody knew who Cézanne was.” 

24. Nicolas Poussin on Caravaggio: 
“Carvaggio’s art is painting for lackeys. This man has come into the world to destroy painting.” 

25. Titian on Tintoretto: 
“He will never be anything but a dauber.” 

26. Salvador Dalí on Jackson Pollock’s style: 
“…The indigestion that goes with fish soup…” 

27.Gustave Courbet on Edouard Manet’s Olympia: 
“It’s flat, it is isn’t modeled. It’s like the Queen of Hearts after a bath.” 

28. Frederic Leighton on James McNeil Whistler: 
“My dear Whistler, you leave your pictures in such a sketchy, unfinished state. Why don’t you ever finish them?” 

29. James McNeil Whistler on Frederic Leighton: 
“My dear Leighton, why do you ever begin yours?” 

30. Anonymous vandal on Shepard Fairey: 
 

Newsweek Magazine: Aug 28, 2011 10:00 AM EDT

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.

To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.

None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.

There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.