LEGO Turns Down Artist's Bulk Order On Political Grounds
The Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei art show set to take place in Australia in December 2015 was planning on using large amounts of LEGO bricks to execute a number of statues. Unfortunately this would have required that LEGO sell the art exhibition a number of bricks – in bulk. According to Ai Weiwei, the fact that LEGO has decided NOT to sell him the bricks suggests that they've discriminated against him and have decided to use their position of power to censor his artwork.
It was in June of this year that the Ai Weiwei Studio began to design a number of artworks that'd require a vast amount of LEGO bricks to complete. According to the studio, "The artworks' concept relates to freedom of speech." Because LEGO will not sell Ai Weiwei the bricks directly – at least not when they have knowledge of their intended use – the artist is not pleased.
Lego will tell us what to do,or not to do.that is awesome! https://t.co/7VKGWBcKMg
— 艾未未 Ai Weiwei (@aiww) October 25, 2015
NOTE: The image you see at the head of this article is part of the "Making History. 50 years LEGO" campaign from around the year 2009. You can find additional political images from this campaign at Gutewerbung – it is not known if any of these images made it to print or were actually used by LEGO for their own advertising.Below you'll see an image of a previous exhibition made by Weiwei with LEGO bricks. There portraits were constructed of LEGO bricks and exhibited at Alcatraz prison. This photo comes from HiFructose
Below you'll see the text Ai Weiwei suggests came from LEGO in response to his studio's request for bricks.
"We regret to inform you that it is against our corporate policy to indicate our approval of any unaffiliated activities outside the LEGO licensing program. However, we realize that artists may have an interest in using LEGO elements, or casts hereof, as an integrated part of their piece of art. In this connection, the LEGO Group would like to draw your attention to the following:
• The LEGO trademark cannot be used commercially in any way to promote, or name, the art work. • The title of the artwork cannot incorporate the LEGO trademark.
• We cannot accept that the motive(s) are taken directly from our sales material/copyrighted photo material.
• The motive(s) cannot contain any political, religious, racist, obscene or defaming statements.
• It must be clear to the public that the LEGO Group has not sponsored or endorsed the art work/project.
Therefore I am very sorry to let you know that we are not in a position to support the exhibition Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei by supplying the bulk order."
So basically LEGO is saying that while they can't really stop Weiwei from using their bricks to do artwork, they won't sell him said bricks with knowledge that he'll be using them for political artwork. They won't do this because it could be seen as supporting said political artwork, which is against their policy.
Weiwei has since suggested that he'll begin setting up "collection points" at which citizens can send his studio LEGO bricks to be used in the exhibition.