Modern art was CIA 'weapon' (1995)
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
In other words, the US acted like a good government and helped the arts flourish, because it had a competition. It sounds like a joke, but in Us if you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.
Write that open source software is a weapon against Chinese industry and you'll get CIA funding. Heh, after all Tor got funds from the Navy...
https://youtube.com/watch?t=68m51s&v=rqPE0YYgwjI
Rockefeller: This is not a revolution, Diego. This is United States. It's
not Russia.
Rivera: And I am Diego Rivera. Not Frederick Remington.
Man: You understand that it is entirely inappropriate to feature
a communist leader in the lobby of a Rockefeller Building?
Rivera: No! I believe nothing in art is inappropriate. I paint what I see.
https://youtube.com/watch?t=104m09s&v=rqPE0YYgwjI
Rockefeller: I wouldn't have had this problem with Picasso or Matisse.
Cardinal: We can control the future of art because we pay for the future
of art. Appoint people to your museum board who detest the
Riveras of this world. Celebrate the Matisses. Create the next
wave of art. You have the purse strings, it's quite obvious
you have the power.
Rockefeller: Cultural power. To pay for the Matisse.
All: Celebrate colors. Celebrate form. Portraits. Countrysides.
Men on horses. Sunsets. Nudes. Cardinal: Nelson will fund the new wave of art. A traveling exhibit
throughout Europe, highlighting American artists.
Mathers: Non-politcal.
Rockefeller: Yes. Abstract. Colors and form, not politics.
Cardinal: My papers will hail it as the next new thing. Canonize the
artist. Make them rich. And soon enough, all artists will be
doing the next new thing.
Mathers: You think? Something about artists, they always get socially
concerned.
Cardinal: Sure, but they won't get paid for it.
Rockefeller: They won't be seen, they will have no influence.
Mathers: Rather than starve, they will adapt, it's survival.
"The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan ... When Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its flamboyant president in 1939, at the age of thirty, he became the prime instigator and funder of its publicity, acquisitions and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street."
> replacing "socially conscious" art by funding "abstract" art
In 1955, the NY Times led with "United States has Secret Sonic Weapon-Jazz"
http://thereisjazzbeforetrane.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-has-sonic-secret-weapon-jazz-nytimes.html
Several of the most high profile musicians subsequently dropped out of that program after touring Europe for a while.
Supposedly the good reception they got in cosmopolitan centres like Paris put their treatment by the US public and their handlers in the government in a grim light.
tor didn't simply "get funds" from the navy. It was invented at the Naval Research Lab. As explained to me at the time, they were trying to generalize the principles of mixmaster remailers to internet routing.
- The entire entertainment industry.
- The LGBT-movement / Pussy Riot.
- Social networks, the internet, email providers and search engines.
- Quantum computing and advanced NLP.
Clearly they wanted to keep "the (perpetual) fight against terrorism" on this list, but Russia did not listen.
As an intentional cultural weapon (in the manner OP describes) I don't think it's actually ascendant yet, but it will be.
I always thought that was a putin/surkov double-bluff.
Adam Curtis spoke about Russian government vocally backing various organizations, some hostile and some friendly to it. That way people are never sure who to trust, because even opposition is funded by gov. One difference is that Russians broadcast who they sponsor, given their target is the public.
Makes me wonder if CIA let slip it was using art as weapon to Russians, then watch them panic.
Of course the rabbit hole never ends and a even more "spy novel plot" is the americans knew the russians knew so seeing as modern art is pretty much a waste of time WRT geopolitical struggles, we likely fed the artists a side dish of disinformation knowing that some of the disinfo will get back to the russians.
The right promotes that idea too; or rather, that all (gov't sponsored) cultural advancement only comes from the left.
I guess traditionalists are not against all new ideas, they're more against thinking that old = bad.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1...
Of course, sometimes things turn out to be more hostile to you than you expected them to be, so caution is in order -- but not paralysis.
I don't think this is the case here. Can't speak for the US, where it might not have mattered much, but in post-war Europe the arts (fine arts, writing, etc) were very important in left wing politics and a serious social force to want to control.
To the point that such art was a popular phenomenon, not something isolated -- people, including younger people, were hungry for those things (from the way 60's US kids were hungry for rock music et al. Artists played a prominent role in culture, were celebrated in the media, participated in demonstrations, influenced politics etc. Edit: think of people like Aragon, Sartre, Gunter Gruss, Duras, Montand, Beuys, Brecht, Godard, Antonioni, Theodorakis, Dario Fo, and countless others etc.
Now, of these artists there were 2 major divisions: those loyal to the party and the communist cause, and those critical of USSR and more into intellectual euro-communism etc.
CIA managed to fund and nourish the latter, more easily tempted by modern abstract expressionism, pop art, jazz, etc, which, while more progressive in stance, it was also more watered down and didn't pose any major political threat (the way USSR influence did).
>Adam Curtis spoke about Russian government vocally backing various organizations, some hostile and some friendly to it. That way people are never sure who to trust, because even opposition is funded by gov.
So, just like with the US and lots of opposition parties, "independent" organizations, NGOs, etc. Only the latter is doing it in other countries too (funding various groups in favor of its interests, and even some seemingly against). And unlike the US government, foreign governments can and do fall because of such schemes, or at least their domestic policies can be heavily influenced by such foreign intervention.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joff...
Americans by and large absorb what is within the bounds of acceptable political thought from mass media. What you don't see are the hands behind the scenes sculpting our culture.
[0] http://www.salon.com/2015/07/31/youre_watching_pentagon_prop...
-Marshall McLuhan
We're currently on "Contemporary Art", which is going to be a hard label to shake...
Canning shit and presenting that as art piece is hilarious. Someone paying $37 for that canned shit in 1961 is even more hilarious. But somebody paying £182,500 for that his is again even more hilarious. And just consider the "inspiration" people get from that?
I shit you not.
Then some dude comes to you "I like it. Would 500k$ be enough?".
What do you respond? "Aww man, it's just a joke. That's too much." vs. "Sold!"?
And the joke lives on.
And I believe the hidden emotions of nations have been diluted into other channels when wars (a large scale PTSD) and then scare crow competition were the primary ones, nowadays it might be running in subtler ways.
http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-sociali...
The article does make you ask questions, though:
>If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Was it just a matter of proving to the Soviets that America could be even more cultured due to freedom of expression? Or was it the Trotskyites looking to show that Stalin's brand of communism was inferior to Trotsky's? It does make you wonder...
Does a painting like this http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_57.92.jpg lose or gain new value in the context of being an unwitting participant in a sophisticated exercise of distraction?
Does the artist's original intention behind his or her art take a second place to the newly revealed absurdist quality?
Modern art and Jazz were not very outspoken on political issues, it was very easy to sponsor them as the artists were not likely to bite the hand that feeds them (unlike Rock musicians who were much more unruly).
Maybe it was propaganda aimed at an western audience? You still have to claim to be open minded and liberal and tell it to your own people; (see how we tolerate modern art? The commies are less liberal, never mind that we are not very liberal to minorities, blacks or those who we label to be communist sympathizers)
i think in the east Rock music (later) was doing more damage to the communist regimes (in real terms) than Jazz. Modern art and jazz had a more limited appeal, while Rock music (later) had a much wider audience.
(modern art was brait is funny that the person that helped the CIA here (post Stalin) was Khrushchev - in December 1962 he lashed out on modern art at a modern art exhibition in Moscow, following that they started a official campaign against modern art.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Neizvestny
Khrushchev lashed out on the artist Ernst Neizvestny, interstingly he seems to have regretted that move once ousted, as Neizvestny was later approached by Khrushchev's family to design the tomb/monument for the former general secretary. go figure.
Maybe this modern art thing was designed to take some influence on the direction of cultural discourse during the thaw (relative liberalization) of the soviet union after the death of Stalin.
Those are my guesses, I bet I got at least one right.
Legislators and bureaucrats do it all of the time.
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.
Perhaps not duped. But, how many other types of art were stifled by having a secret fund devoted to creating, promoting and praising one type of art.
Which raises the question of why the CIA chose abstract expressionism as the vehicle of choice for its propaganda. Perhaps because it is hard to be subversive with a work of art that every observer will interpret differently. Or perhaps because unlike other art that has some common ground for discourse between two observers, abstract art is like watching clouds pass by. "I see a baby!" one watcher will say. "I see a puppy!" another watcher will say. And that's where the conversation ends. It's the ultimate expression of individualism, but also the ultimate killer of dialogue.
In Park City, Utah, there is (or at least was) a gallery that sold Russian Expressionist paintings. It had a painting in it that was controversial in Russian art in the 1960s. It showed workers in a cloth factory, and it was controversial because one of the workers had a wistful or dreamy expression on her face. That expression nearly cost the painter his license as an artist. That's how heavy-handed the USSR was toward art - you needed a license to be an artist, and the government cared about the expressions on peoples' faces in your paintings.
Another thing I saw in that gallery: There was a difference in the landscapes done after 1990. They still are impressionist landscapes, but they have little dots of bright color where there were flowers. Pre-1990, the landscapes looked the same, but the overall impression was more drab. The freedom that came in 1991 showed up even in the landscapes, because the artists felt different.
But how is that different from what the CIA is doing here. If they really wanted to be a patron of the arts and freedom of expression then why this focus on a single art movement.
Nobody is contesting that United States was not a more free society than the Soviet Union. The implication of art as a tool for propaganda doesn't go away simply because there were other active artists who weren't funded by the CIA.
To put it another way, they were using tax dollars in a very weird way to subsidize the kind of art they liked.
Like when the question came up "Hey which art movement are we going to prop up with millions of dollars?" some head honcho said "I like abstract expressionism.. make it so".
To put it another way, do you believe any decision at the CIA involving millions of dollars is not made without hordes of analysts poring over every available action and every possible outcome.
I totally grok where they're coming from. If you don't love something, you're not going to hold it up as a model of what makes your culture superior. I love abstract expressionism and find megachurches creepy and weird, so I would hold up abstract expressionism as a fine example of what makes America great. Someone who loves megachurches and hates abstract expressionism would do the opposite. (By way of measure, my favorite painting ever is Jackson Pollack's "Mural", which I got to admire up close a lot when I was at the University of Iowa)
So yes, those CIA directors who made that decision really, truly loved abstract expressionism. They also found it the perfect antidote to the soul-deadening rigidity of Socialist Realism. They felt socialist realism was the result of a dying culture.