The San Diego Union-Tribune wants to check up on the 88 members of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Collectors Committee who will meet in May to decide upon which of five works the museum will acquire. The collectors pay $5 or $10,ooo to be members of the committee and get to vote on the works in their order of preference. The combined $650,000 from the committee is then used to acquire some of the works. But the paper wants readers to make their own lists from the five works being considered:

“What I like this year is the range of media,” said museum director Hugh Davies. “We’ve got photography, we’ve got cast bronze, we’ve got cast acrylic, we’ve got painting, a three-dimensional installation, carved marble.” There’s also a range of ages, gender, nationalities and styles. […]

Click through to the story to see the options and artists. One work, however, deserves special mention because it is by detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei:

After about 20 years spent studying and making art in the U.S., he returned to China in the mid-’60s and started collecting Ming and Qing dynasty furniture, which he transformed into sculpture. Among its multiple references and layers of meaning, “Marble Chair,” carved from a single piece of marble, resembles a chair that his father (the famed poet Ai Qing) was allowed to keep when he and his family were in exile in the Gobi Desert.

 

Which of These Artworks Would You Buy? (San Diego Union-Tribune)