To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan - the great American post-war academic - Dylan's message was in the medium, whereas Ai Weiwei is the message. When I interviewed him for Newsnight last year, he said he most admired Marcel Duchamp, not for his art, but for his attitude to life.
And this is what he has attempted to emulate. His art is a secondary by-product of his view of the world and his place within it - his attitude to life is the real artwork. So for Ai Weiwei the installation at Tate Modern of his porcelain sunflower seeds is an example of one of his works of art, and his arrest and detention, another.
That is not to say he is pleased to be banged up, or that it is part of some grand artistic plan, but that the man, his politics and his art are one inseparable thing. Which I suspect means that if the roles were reversed, and Bob Dylan was under arrest in China, that Ai Weiwei would probably have had something to say by now.
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