Ai Weiwei Quotes

Art is for everybody.

I try to make things that are not elitist.

The public has a right to art ... Art is for everybody.

Art is not an elitist gift for a few select people. Art is for everyone.

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

Why should be elite, music? Excuse me. Music must be for everybody.

I don't think anything's underground anymore. And I think that's a good thing. Everything is up for grabs.

Art should be for everyone, not just the rich.

The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ’self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. … I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together.

I suggest that the great art belongs to all people, all the time--that indeed it is made for the people, by the people, to the people.

Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious.

We have found a way to bring to millions of people an art that they can understand.

Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.

I am increasingly unimpressed by works of art that require a college degree to understand. I think that art should be for everyone. And people should be moved by it.

Democracy must live as it thinks and think as it lives

The best way to kill anything un-American is to drag it out into the open; because anything un-American cannot live in the sunlight.

We can have more democracy and openness and still be efficient.

… institutions have lost their credibility, not because they don't operate but rather because they operate behind closed doors; they have not been opened to the Chilean people.

Open societies, open governments, and an open international system are risky propositions. But they are humankind’s best hope for harnessing the power not only of states, but also of businesses, universities, civic organizations, and citizens to address the planetary problems that now touch us all.

There is no one I'd like to exclude when I design. It's not like I'm trying to design for everyone. Probably can't do that. Yet I try not to exclude anyone.

It would be easier to be more mysterious, but I try to be accessible.

Self-expression should not be a challenge that demands extraordinary talent but should be a right accessible to all.

Music is contagious and everywhere and democratic, and that's what drew me in. I was interested in acting and being a director, but one of the things that bored me about theatre was that it was not accessible to everyone.