Shihoko Iida on curating:

“Curators should be attentive to what is going on around the world, as art is part of our society and our lives, not something isolated and exclusive. Curators of contemporary art in particular should take responsibility for contextualizing the artists of our time, engaging with society and its various communities.”

Claire Bishop's short but precise definition of art:

 "a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world.”

Give Tomorrow Back to Me
Vocals: Ai Weiwei & Zuoxiao Zuzhou

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and dissident, who is in big trouble. I honour his courage and his strong commitment to free expression. JD

"You own the skies, you are the banker, you own the water cannon, and the bullets, but the bullet wounds are mine.

You own the land, you set the game rules, you own the handcuffs, and the lies, but the disappearance is mine.
Yesterday is yours, today is yours, but you won’t have tomorrow.
Give tomorrow back to me. You don’t have tomorrow, tomorrow is mine."

On Feeling and Reaon:

Gao Xingjian, from his essay "Return to Paiting."

"Knowledge, for the artist, does not necessarily proceed from feeling to reason. It emerges out of reason and feeling both, to be sublimated as spirit. In art, the spirit is free of theological connotation; one finds it in human nature just as one finds poetry there. An aesthetic judjement rooted in sensations turns reason into spirit, guiding the artist through [his]^sic nascent creative thoughts, and leaves pure intellectual speculation to philosphers."

On Individual Freedom and Anarchy:

An Anarchist world, a Surrealist world...they are the same ~Andre Breton

"Surrealism as both an artistic and political movement aims at the liberation of the human being from the constraints of capitalism, the state, and the cultural forces that limit the reign of the imagination." Wikipedia

On Dadaism, Surrealism, and Oppression:

In her book, Night of Stone, in which she examines death, memory, and spiritual repression in Soviet Russia, Catherine Merridale refers to Dadaist and Surrealist movements as "Anarchic celebrations of the unconscious."