This text originally appeared in the August-September 2026 issue of The Critic.

I try not to write about an artist’s work more than once, not least because new ideas are contemporary art’s currency, and particularly when the work is poor. Since I already berated a gigantic, hollow installation by Ai WeiWei in Prague in 2018, I have little interest in seeing his “monumental” exhibition Button Up! in Manchester. Judging by this project’s bombastic press release, which boasts of thirty tonnes of buttons being used in the production of sail-sized flags, the artist has had no new ideas in the eight years since my last review. Ai’s installations have long failed to excite even children, so the 3.5 million toy bricks used in the making of model weapons for Factory International (in a “largest ever” such artwork) won’t make a difference. Yet this tedious oeuvre has been the bread and butter of the world’s grandest art institutions since Ai’s outing in the 1999 Venice Biennale. It’s so perniciously terrible that it has damaged how we can think about art. This, though little else, makes Ai worth condemning twice.

There’s a formula to the myth of Ai WeiWei. Millions of ceramic sunflower seeds made him a critic of social oppression. Thousands of stone tools, a master in historical materialism. A sports stadium had him as the beacon of democracy. A rubber inflatable the size of a football pitch cast him as the good immigrant’s spokesperson. 

Each project pairs a visual gag with a glib message about freedom or human rights. So dull are these images and so sanctimonious their payload that I struggle to imagine Ai himself has any belief in them. In Manchester, the 24-hour reenactment of his 2011 detention by the Chinese secret police was full of blunders, proving that nobody, not even the artist takes the art seriously. 

The public don’t really like what they see — conceptual art is boring even when it’s this big — but tickets still sell for selfies and these displays get more approving media attention than many spectacles of the activism-industrial complex. Most critics and curators are lukewarm, yet few have explicitly admitted that Ai’s generic brand of dissidence achieves absolutely nothing aesthetically or politically. 

All photographs courtesy of Factory International. Button Up! continues until 6 September. Don’t see it.