Still, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye was another who attracted the attention of the cultural police. His proposal to display several pigs tattooed in Disney and Louis Vuitton logos was rejected by the cultural bureau, which said that it didn't consider live animals to be art.
The catalogues were not ready on exhibition day because offending pages had to be excised, and exhibitors had hassles obtaining visas because of the Olympic season crackdown. Some had to apply twice from different cities and provide letters of recommendation, but most squeezed in eventually
The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. BBtv's hidden cameras captured everything.
When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
Internet Helps Liberate, Create Music in China
By Laura Sydell
Listen Now
[7 min 48 sec] add to playlist
Chinese electronic musician B6
B6, a Shanghai-based electronic musician, explored Western music first on pirated CDs and then at music-sharing sites on the Web. Now he collaborates online with other performers.
B6's studio equipment -- a jumble of keyboards, etc.
Enlarge
B6 works out of a home studio in a Shanghai high-rise. Above, some of his musical arsenal.
Discover China's Indie Music
Neocha Web site image
Neocha.com
With Sean Leow, B6 co-founded the music-sharing site Neocha.com, an ad-supported service that lets listeners discover music and pays musicians a share of advertising revenue.
* Neocha.com
* Neocha's "Next" Player
Morning Edition, June 25, 2008 - Second in a three-part series.
When America was rocking to the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the airwaves in China were dominated by songs with lyrics from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
It's more open today, but the Communist government still bans anything that mentions sex or violence, or that has "low class humor" - which bans an awful lot of American music. So the music most likely to come pouring out of the radio in China is syrupy ballads usually produced in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
But Chinese musicians and fans are finding a whole new universe of sound on the Internet. And it's helping to create and nourish a new generation of independent artists in China.
From Black-Market Discs to Napster and Beyond
One of them is B6, a 27-year-old electronic musician. He lives and works on the first floor of a high-rise on the outskirts of Shanghai. He's part of China's burgeoning electronic-music scene.
Growing up, the CDs B6 listened to were mostly sold on the black market.
"When I was in high school, I used to listen to rock 'n' roll music," he says. "At that time, it was very difficult to get foreign or Western music."
And then, in 1999, the Internet came to China - and B6 and his fr
BEIJING, China (CNN) -- James Miles, of The Economist, has just returned from Lhasa, Tibet. The following is a transcript of an interview he gave to CNN.
James Miles
So in effect what they did was sacrifice the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger. And then being able to move in gradually with troops with rifles that they occasionally let off with single shots, apparently warning shots, in order to scare everybody back into their homes and put an end to this.
Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. B
What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa.
Well we didn't see any evidence of any organized activity, at least there was nothing in what I sensed and saw during those couple of days of unrest in Lhasa, there was anything organized behind it.
Now numerous Hans that I spoke to say that they are so afraid they may leave the city, which may have very damaging consequences for Lhasa's economy, Tibet's economy.
But their fear now is that Tibetans will blow up the railway line. That it is now actually safer to fly out of Tibet than to go by railway.
And also many troops there whose uniforms were distinctly lacking in the usual insignia of either the police or the riot police. So my very, very strong suspicion is that the army is out there and is in control in Lhasa. A
I've been a journalist in China now for 15 years altogether. This is the first time that I've ever got official approval to go to Tibet. And it's remarkable I think that they decided to let me stay there and probably they felt that it was a bit of a gamble. But as the protests went on I think they also probably felt that having me there would help to get across the scale of the ethnically-targeted violence that the Chinese themselves have also been trying to highlight.
And the authorities were responding to these occasional clashes with Tibetans not by moving forward rapidly with either riot police and truncheons and shields, or indeed troops with rifles. But for a long time, just with occasional, with the very occasional round of tear gas
Toolmaking not only resulted in tools, but also the reconfiguration of our brains so they comprehended the world on the same terms as our toolmaking hands interacted with it. With mirror neurons, something entirely new entered the world: memes--a far more effective and speedy method for pooling knowledge and passing it around than the old genetic way.