近百家媒体，将近200位记者正参加艾未未 作品的媒体日活动。世界主流媒体基本都来了。至今仍没有一家大陆媒体采访报道。一声叹息，中国媒体。
涡轮厅艾未未作品简介第一句是：What you see is not what you see, what you see is not what it means. 你看见的并不是你想象的，你想象的并不是它意味的。靠，原来是哲学作品。
老艾：作品的宏大气质和张艺谋作品的宏大气势完全不同。老艾的宏大由无数独立个体组成；老谋子的，除了宏大，就是大红。 老艾的葵花籽，假得真诚；老谋子的开幕式，真的好假。
记者：这一亿多粒陶瓷瓜子，有多少是您亲自做的？ 艾： 我一共做了三颗。工人说不合格，还淘汰了。
参与葵花籽制作的近2千工人，大多数是景德镇下岗的年轻女工。艾未未 的作品给她们提供了一个展示传统技能的机会，这两年中也有了不错的收入。老艾说，他还会琢磨出新的作品，交给这些村民做，分享他们的快乐。
老艾：用一亿颗手工葵花籽，以最耐心最极端的方式，诠释了什么叫做个体的独立。（当然这是我的个人解读）
我的解读是：这些瓜子远看起来一样，走近才发现每一颗都不同，每一颗都是独立的。老艾对川震孩子SW名单的执着，似乎也在这件作品里体现了出来。每一颗瓜子都是个体，值得用最耐心的方式创造，每一个生命都很宝贵，不能淹没在滚滚红尘中。
一亿粒“葵花籽”这件作品的含义，每个人都可以有自己的解读。艺术家本人不会给出一个标准答案。艺术是提出问题，而非提供答案。
这一亿颗陶瓷葵花籽（还不包括无数淘汰的次品），从5,6年前开始筹备，景德镇超过1600名熟练工历时2年多，近30道工序，纯手工制作。
The Affirmationists demand the singularity of a critical genealogy. In all the arts in the 20th century, great artists have tried to undo the enterprise of Romantic expressivity and to give art its necessary indifference (froideur ), in the same sense in which Mallarmé reclaimed for the poetic Idea that it should arise, indifferent to neglect and to obsolescence, like a Constellation. These artists, often isolated, have slowly composed configurations comprehensible only today. They have maintained the will of an art-concept which tolerates neither finitude, nor flesh, nor redemption. An art completely allergic to obscurantist hypnosis as well as to the pornographic stupidities of festive performances. An art which is not that of Buddha, nor that of a desire torn between the festival and the morgue. An art effectively divorced from Romanticism. An art which could be the equivalent of what the poet Alvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, called a “mathematics of being.”
The tautest and truest art of the 20th century has tried to show, as Alvaro de Campos says, that “Newton’s binomial is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo.” Which means: it has tried to grasp the real with the same impersonal rigor as that of mathematics. We could name some heroes of this attempt, constantly opposed to the succession of neo-Romanticisms, such as that of the Surrealists, and, worse yet, that of the Situationists, to say nothing of the contemporary Corporealists and Vitalists. The list—we will limit it to the disappeared—is arbitrary; it only indicates the apparent absence of contour in what outlines, in the dead heavens of the century, our constellation. The Affirmative constellation. There are the great Affirmationists, the best, not needing to know they were: those who developed by themselves, through their art, an entire configuration, in principle as well as in execution. Fernando Pessoa for poetry, Picasso for painting, Arnold Schoenberg for music, Bertolt Brecht for the theater, Ossip Zadkine for sculpture, Charles Chaplin for the cinema, William Faulkner for the novel, Merce Cunningham for dance…
But we can’t forget Wallace Stevens, who affirms the poem’s possibility of capturing being from appearing; Osip Mandelstam, grasping all the sacred signs in the immensity of the cadaver of Time; Paul Celan, who affirms the transpoetic possibility with the poem “After Auschwitz.” We celebrate Alban Berg, who affirms the integral possibility of opera beyond its evident death; and Bela Bartok, who perpetuates the experimental force, contrapuntal and rhythmic, of the string quartet. Or Olivier Messiaen, affirming the incorporation of a sort of sonorous lentitude, through subtle masses and temporal tangles, of the innocent contemplative life, while Anton Webern constructs the mystical value of sophisticated silences.
We will praise Affirmation: of Malevitch or Mondrian, for the ontological certitude of geometries; of Frantisek Kupka or Mark Rothko, for their power—oh, draperies of the soul!—of the great and pure contrasts of sufficient color. We will say: Kandinsky, legitimator of the connection of signs! Jackson Pollock, enclosed effervescence of the infinite gesture! We salute you, Pirandello, fecund decision of duplicity, aptitude for the truth of the illusion! And Claudel equally, wagging tongue of conservative dissatisfaction to the summit of the heavens.
Germaine Richier’s idolatrous insects, Henry Moore’s colossal maternities, Brancusi’s pure signs!
Still other Affirmations: Woolf’s enveloped vision of ephemeral totalizations, Katherine Mansfield’s morning benediction, Beckett’s ascetic perseverance of the desire to exist. And you, brother Malraux, you who took History to the limits of its rhetorical celebration.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, revelation of the force of dream detained by the joining of setting and lights. Orson Welles, design of tortuous poetics of visibility… （《肯定主义宣言》）
