The Royal Academy has launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring Weiwei's Trees to the UKKickstarter is home to some pretty weird stuff. But currently a rather bigger fundraiser than usual is taking place. The Royal Academy of Arts is bypassing traditional fundraising methods for it's latest exhibition with Ai Weiei, choosing instead to crowd fund acquisitions using it's digital Klout. Its campaign, which ends on the 21st August, aims to raise a total of £100,000 in order to bring Ai Weiwei’s eight Tree sculptures to the RA courtyard, to accompany his first major institutional show in Britain. “He stands for something that we all stand for, which is the right to be different, the right to not comform, the right to speak out, the right to be a human being,” explains artist Bob and Roberta Smith in a campaign video filled with big named trustees and academicians. “He’s the world’s principal non-conformist. And we like to think we’re non-conformists.”  If this isn’t reason enough for generosity, a number of bizarre rewards are offered in exchange for your cash, including a ‘wink’ (whatever that means) from Weiwei’s sour-looking cat, Garfield. All eyes are on Weiwei at the moment, following the denial of a visa to attend the RA show in a wondrous spectacle of incompetence by the British government. The artist and human rights activist was, for unclear reasons, held and tortured for 81 days without charge in Beijing in 2011 – which he had rightly not declared as a conviction. This was seen as reason enough to deny the visa by corrupt immigration officials who had absolutely no idea what they were doing, but a reversal of the decision was imminent once Theresa May actually thought about it for a second. Read our report on Museum 2.0, with expert opinion from the world's top curators, to find out more about how tomorrow's museums are upping their game.