Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 - June 2020 (7 comments)
Pretty sure there have been other threads, including on the Peter Matthiessen (Paris Review) connection - anybody want to find them?
Edit: there's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10963429 - and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964477 linking to https://www.salon.com/2012/05/27/exclusive_the_paris_review_....
Edit 2 - found some more:
During Cold War, CIA used ‘Doctor Zhivago’ as a tool to undermine Soviet Union - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7991903 - July 2014 (30 comments)
Abstract Expressionism was (in part) a covert CIA operation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891222 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Others?
Did you ever posted how exactly do you find a similar posts despite them having a very different URIs?
https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+%22modern+art%22+site%3A...
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
Modern art (and unlikely any other type of art) was not created as a psy-op. That is mere clickbaitery in headline writing. It was used, like other cultural exports, as one of many aspects of promoting US values and position.
I mean, in a way it is. Public education in america teaches narratives of colonialism and history that are generally pro-america. Even when they touch on things critically, there is a general slant towards mythologizing and deifying. I.e. "Thomas Jefferson was a great man and founding father of our great nation. Also he owned slaves, which was bad, but it was a different time." Attempts to push a little deeper in terms of criticism are usually met with an aggressive push back (e.g. the "critical race theory" hullabaloo).
> States don't license any doctor, they have to meet certain criteria
The state has definitely used it's powers, tho I'm not sure if doctor licensing has been specifically used, to marginalize people with beliefs considered radical. e.g. during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> are those state-level psy-ops?
The term psy-op is specifically about information control and messaging, etc. So I wouldn't apply to just anything that the state does to advance an ideology. But I think it applies well to arts, which is all about ideas. It doesn't apply as well as a description of the use of doctor licensing to further an ideology. For tech companies, it depends on what the tech company does, i.e. a bunch of the FUD around tiktok is about the information control it represents. I don't think psy-op is a good description of an education system with state-directed biases. Because that's more of a long-term state project, rather than a short-term targeted influencing. To me education's pro-state issues are much better described by words like "bias" or "propaganda" or "indoctrination".
Probably a longer answer than you were expecting, but I really do think cia-funding art + writing is pretty clearly a psy-op. That doesn't mean the artists they funded weren't real or good. It just means their level of success was partially the result of ideologically directed funding by the cia with the goal of influencing public opinion about communism/socialism.
This is not unique. The standard of old used to be Kings sponsoring bards. Both the bankers in Florence and the Church were in essence state actors. The banking families basically ran Florence.
Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Malevich, Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse etc were very far from obscure by the time the CIA was even founded.
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/how-billie-holiday-was-t...
> When congressmen expressed worry about [Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics]’s tactics, he assured them his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”
Is it really that hard to understand why people don't get the hype around a Jackson Pollock or Voice of Fire? No need to invent weird reasons for this.
I'm going to speculate OP is correct here. Engineers do get persnickety when faced with sufficient ambiguity and messy historical context. Visual arts have both, and fear of the unknown isn't at all a weird default position for humans.
This is such a common human phenomenon that there’s a fable about it: the emperor who wears no clothes.
People will mercilessly ridicule the kid who says the emperor is naked. There is a bit of that type of ridicule in this thread. It’s silly. All reasonable people will agree that while you may be able to call anything art, not everything can be good art. Only an occasional isolated snowshovel or urinal (or 3 as it were) can be art, and only in the ironic it’s not really art but it is ha ha sense. Yet people insist that anything can be validly described as a work of art, none of it any better or worse than the rest.
Sorry, but that’s wrong, obviously so, and just deeply offensive to anyone who cares at all. It’s literally the negation of art, espoused by people who claim to love art.
Well, that's you. Other people have other experiences. In my case peer pressure was pretty heavily against art in pretty much any form, being from a small agricultural town, with technical background and studying and working in engineering. I was ridiculed for my interest in music and later other art forms.
In my environment there was no Pollock hype, 95% people didn't know who he is and the rest thought 'that's not art'. Yet it indeed is art, as is Duchamp's urinal, and many other creations. It might not be for you, but it is for someone. There are many art forms and artworks I don't care for, but at least I don't claim to speak for "all reasonable people" because perception and understanding is subjective. Expertise in art can give you better understanding and change your perception if you want, but ultimately there is a big share of subjectivity.
It's offensive when you claim I am not reasonable and do not care at all, but more than that, it's quite obviously completely wrong.
It kinda is. In the sense that no one is confused if you say you do not Understand the 400th Marvel movie without seeing the previous ones, but art, which largely exists as a conversation with the movements that happened before it, is somehow expected to be understood without context. And mocked if not easily digestible.
It is why artists like Banksy, who in my opinion offer little to nothing, cause a big stir. You do not need to understand what was happening in the art world in the 2000s to get Banksy, a instagram photo does all the work you need.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is now considered a japanese masterpiece, but in reality is heavily influenced by Dutch landscapes and Japan at the time considered it almost foreign art. As if some european now did anime. The conversation and circumstance of that print gives it a lot of nuance, and makes it infinitely more interesting than just the wave and Fuji in the background. Similarly Pollock, as pretentious as he was, lived in an interesting time when even math and physics where shaking their conceptual underpinnings. The time they lived in was a mess, that experience, put to canvas as a rejection of Easel and figurative painting and making the process and important part of the actual finished product is interesting almost in itself, beyond the painting.
Think how many artists now show "behind the scenes" of their work, bringing people closer to the work. From Guillermo del Toro showing his monsters, to actors doing live chats, to artists publishing their doodles and sketches. Pollocks work was an attempt to merge that with the piece itself, make the action of painting it as obvious as possible, compared to art movements like the European French Academy that would knock you points if the brush strokes where visible. Their attempt at perfet painting, make the artist invisible and the subjects "greater than men", all angels and stuff is almost diametrically opposed to Pollock, that wants you to almost see where he tripped, where he was soft and where he just slammed the brush.
Sorry for the rant, just think that it is such a shame, with how interesting art can be that people reject it out of, what looks to me, just not putting the minimum amount of effort to learn about it.
An interesting contrast is movies, which so far have not taken that hermetic turn to the same extent. You look at a list of "the hundred greatest movies of all time", and basically 90% of them can be appreciated by anyone with the attention span. You don't need to go to college (or be Italian) to appreciate "The Bicycle Thieves", let alone be an expert on movie history.
Once an art form takes that hermetic turn, then everything becomes a game of relying on what experts say and brand management. That's why comic books are trash and Roy Lichtenstein panels sell for millions.
This is how art has always worked though? The humanism of the renaissance is a direct conversation with the christian art of decades prior. When paint became cheaper and non kings could get portraits, rich people got still lifes to show they had fresh fruit and stuff other's couldn't. Almost every art movement can be traced directly to the people, the time, the wealth or the previous art movement. This is not a modern art problem.
> Even without context, you can get something out of looking at Michaelangelo's Pieta
I have had a panic attack in front of a Rothko. Even without context about him selling those paintings to the Tate before committing suicide the emotion on them is insane and I say this as someone who spent years mocking Rothko as a dumb rich person experiment of how much BS sothebys and christies can sell.
> which so far have not taken that hermetic turn to the same extent.
I think this is incredibly easy to refute, considering the amount of movies related to making movies. Due to the specialisation from capitalism, now the experts in making movies, only know how to make movies and go further and further into making movies like The Fablemans about their own industry. (This is not a one off; once upon a time in hollywood, a star is born, the artist, hugo, hail Cesar, tropic thunder...) They are even making movies about focus groups like Air about how they managed to make people design by comittee the greatest basketball shoe ever.
Their viability as comercial products, focus testing, and appreciability with little to no movie experience is hurting the art, not enhancing it. Movies are dumbed down nowadays because the aim is having as many people as possible understand them. Movies where metaphor is heavily used are usually not blockbusters. See Anihillation, a great lovecraftian horror dealing with cancer, change, loss. And whose entire conversation online was about "aliens" despite the movie being super in your face about what it was really about.
> then everything becomes a game of relying on what experts say
You are allowed to like or dislike "high" art without expert opinions. A lot fo it isn't that high anyway. I love conceptual art, absolutely love it. But it also takes seconds to make. I think the piece Perfect Lovers which is just two wall clocks next to each other is brilliant, but I see why many don't like it. (The piece was made after the artist found out his bf had AIDS and the piece is just two clocks ticking away, knowing the battery of one will run out sooner than the other, and at some point you have one clock ticking and the other stopped before both run out and they replace the bateries).
> The Great Wave off Kanagawa is now considered a japanese masterpiece, but in reality is heavily influenced by Dutch landscapes and Japan at the time considered it almost foreign art. As if some european now did anime.
A lot of great things seem to happen this way. Not being so cultured, I think of food. Whether katsu (Portuguese), massaman curry (Persian), pav bhaji (Portuguese again), guilty American pleasures like General Tso's (Taiping-era Chinese refugees), or your favorite Vietnamese patisserie (out-French the French), these collisions seem to produce great things.
The entire industry of japanese bakery happened almost by accident. After WW2 America forced Japan to buy its exports and one of the things america had loads of was Wheat. Well japan already had rice as its staple food so what where they gonna do with this wheat?
They made tons of flour and made loads of baked goods, that are incredible nowadays. (Its a country with sweet tooth and it shows).
Another brilliant thing they did was electrocute the bread and make Panko, which is crispier and healthier than normal breadcrumbs. Something europeans hadn't thought off cause we made bread the same way for a thousand years.
The Germans are kicking themselves. "Use electrocution to make schnitzel! Why didn't we think of that?!"
There is also a controversy with that piece by Duchamps; there is some evidence it was by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
What if the definition of art is applying some paint to a canvas?
In my experience, copyright and IP law have been leveled against me in employment contracts more than than they've ever helped me maintain a grip on my output. 'Intellectual strip mining' is a good way to put it. The definition of art hasn't protected what I do and changing it probably wouldn't affect that.
Oof, big flashbacks to conversations I wish I never had with essential oils advocates and religious fundamentalists.
Throughout art history, at different levels of abstraction (individuals, schools, countries, philosophies), there is a constant and real conversation going on. A big part of art history (like any history) is finding out what that was at the time. Along with analyzing things ex post facto and coming up with ideas and narratives given our knowledge of all history.
You don't need to "go back to cave dweller's paintings to even have the first idea about what art is", you just need to look at some art. Lots of art can evoke emotion in people with no background in art history, just like lots of food and drink can please people with no background in culinary history. There's a narrow subset, though, that can more or less only be appreciated by people who know the history. I don't think that subset is uniquely important. In fact, I think it belongs at the periphery of art.
An artistic subculture where the majority of attention is on works that don't do anything except deconstruct their mediums--works whose appreciation depends wholly on a socio-political understanding of the artist--is not a subculture I'm very interested in. And I don't think that makes me a dismissive, overly-analytic engineer. Quite the opposite! I think it's those who obsess over history and context instead of content that have lost themselves to analytics. Pure content-appreciation is our primitive, natural instinct.
The CIA was directly reciting stories on an international global level, was ensuring that only positive critiques were widely scene, and much more. They also ensured the funds necessary to keep spreading the art always were readily available, but that was almost inconsequential in contrast to their other interventions. Incidentally the CIA was also doing much of this behind the backs of Congress who were ostensibly opposed to such a scale of propaganda, back in the day.
---
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.
"It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
-- Tom Braden, Head of CIA International Organizations Division [at the time when this was happening]
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
Splashes of colors and abstract geometrical shapes open to interpretation is about as far from political dissent and commentary as you can get.
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Paid-Piper-Cultural-Cold/dp/18620...
by the same author. Makes it very clear that both sides were despotic in their own ways. The USSR used brute force and intimidation. The methods used in the US were more subtle and covert, but just as ideologically - as opposed to creatively - directed.
And about as bloody, too.
Is the popularity of reactive programming a Facebook psy-op? They certainly popularized it via React, but does that mean there was some deep agenda inside Facebook to popularize reactive programming to accomplish some mysterious occult goal? Or was it just that Facebook is big, happened to employ some good devs who liked reactive programming, and dumped a lot of money into it?
When big companies and governments throw money around they distort the market and whatever happens to be in the right place at the right time to grab that cash tends to get favored. That's usually all there is to it unless you can find concrete evidence that (for example) someone with authority in the CIA wanted to promote that specific type of art to achieve a specific societal outcome.
I'm not so sure. Call it a conspiracy theory, but there is at least some evidence that modern art is a fantastic tool for money laundering. Now, this is also true of classical art and patents, but imagine if you are trying to send money with a stupid cover story. Make a piece of modern art in 15 minutes, have other person send $50,000 to "purchase" it...
The art doesn't have to be modern to work this way. It just has to be fungible art with an inflated price tag on it. Any style will do.
Other popular money laundering vehicles include: "investments" in totally hollow shell companies, fake customers to shell or cutout businesses (like the car wash in Breaking Bad), manipulating penny stocks (you basically run a pump and dump against yourself using dirty money to pump and extracting clean money on the other side), cryptocurrency and related things, other big assets like airplanes and boats, etc.
I'm as paranoid as the next guy but in this case I think the premise that the CIA funded artistic expression as a form of propaganda in its own right makes the most sense.
Besides...the CIA makes more money running illegal drugs.
But you're right, it was mostly about the propaganda. And not even particularly covert. The bit that did it has since been carved out into other agencies (eg National Endowment for Democracy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline....
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older.
"If the headline asks a question, try answering 'no'. Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'."
Pretty much any article posted to HN with a “?” At the end that’s not a AskHN prefix should get that response.
Put another way, react would have probably gained a huge following without FB’s marketing (imagine if it was just a few hackers launching it as an open source project). Can we say that much modern art would have gained much fame if it wasn’t for certain critics promoting them or if they gained favourable attention from elites?
There was a lot more happening in art than AbEx. But only AbEx received official approval as an acceptable political metaphor for bold individualism.
Approval included canonisation by museums and galleries and think pieces by art critics.
https://www.artforum.com/print/197406/abstract-expressionism...
There's a lot of people who look at React and think "What the hell? You call this useable?" as well. The point of spending money on popularizing something is usually to popularize it with a specific crowd.
And if you are close to the art crowd, modern art is a) a stupid moniker, because it covers 1860-now, and b) a pretty logical evolution of what was before. You don't have to like it to understand what it's trying to do. The "what the hell" crowd is not the crowd targeted by the marketing.
It even can't explain how "Jackson Pollock’s gestural style [...] drew an effective counterpoint to Nazi [...] oppression," because by the time Pollock got anywhere near famous, WWII was over. Perhaps that sentence doesn't even mean anything. It's just fancy words, because a counterpoint is not an opposition, but a harmonically fitting independent voice. Style over substance, as usual.
The Nazis and USSR had eerily similar art. There’s a thesis that “totalitarian art” is a genre, if not a species, of art.
Most dictators don’t like people thinking for themselves. A bunch of pain blotches on canvas can mean “Stalin is terrible” as “Stalin is great.”
The vague “what does it mean” style of art asks the question “what does it mean?” Which is not a question dictators like having asked.
you can literally invent million dollar excuses for value transfers to arbitrary individuals.
Where?
Let's not dismiss all modern art as fake. As popular of a philistine take that is amongst engineer types.
Compared to that, astroturfing the works of a few modern artists seems trivial (and does not require the CIA or any bogeyman organization, just someone with sufficient clout in the art critic world).
(I'm purposely conflating modern and postmodern art because I imagine that many who see the term "modern art" make that mistake, and because Pollock et al. kind of bridge the two in eschewing representation while still using traditional media.)
However, there are a lot folks here who don't seem to got the intent of this operation, and it was an operation with a goal. The goal was to subvert any trend toward political expression in art in the US as Soviet art was very political and a powerful force in shaping public opinion. We knew we couldn't control it so we ensured that it didn't happen here. Roughly speaking, of course.
When I first watched the movie Cube I thought the idea that people would build a deathtrap and then put people in it because they thought the incomprehensible bureaucracy they worked for wanted that was ludicrous. Now I realise that's the real horror of the film.
I mean compare a random surviving Da Vinci against the stereotypical "Man in Box" install circa 2005 NYC (say a cheap red string tied between two posts, while the audience listens to musak -- to give a dumb exemplar of the type of thing I've heard decribed as Modern Art.)
It is a power move to go around naked pretending to wear cloths and get away with it.
The emporor in the story was fooled. The commoners played along with the emporor's cloths but they openly mock modern art.
The current situation is more of an injoke to mess with commoners.
Compare modern architecture that is nice inside but look horrible for the commoners looking at it from the outside.
Wait a minute.
Something in the spirit of book burning today is more like banning books in public places, like schools or libraries, under penalty of prison.
(up until recently, covers of "I Will Survive" —one of which, sadly no longer available on YouTube, was even in drag— were featured annually in russian state-channel [Россия1] New Year's programming)
> There's this guy from the CIA and he's creeping around Laurel Canyon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Carlson
https://theweek.com/speedreads/689969/tucker-carlson-tried-j...
A lot of it is predicated on the "deep state" being completely evil anti-american people, which is so beyond my experience of federal law officers that it doesn't fit my world view. Look at the CIA's Bush-era legally-questionable torture program, there were tons of whistle blowers and media inquiry, it was not secret for very long at all. But somehow a clearly illegal program that controls the news media has been going undetected for decades? It's just not how the USA works.
No, I don't believe anything like that. In fact I think """Theorists""" are always wrong because it is always impossible to speak to other people's intent. It's hard to even trust a person to accurately tell you their own intent. The system selects for true believers, because there is no more effective mind control than what feels like one's own decisions. I would like to unironically suggest this piece by T. Kaczynski — please don't shoot the messenger :) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-sy...
This is why there's so much overlap between the security state and the 20th Century development of advertising. Both rely on accurately predicting the public's reaction given some stimuli, then trying to inject the most effective stimuli. In advertising it's done in pursuit of profit. In statecraft it's done in pursuit of ?????. Remember that propaganda doesn't mean lies, it means idea-you-feel-compelled-to-share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
"[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate “not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'”. "Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, 'How We Advertised America', in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
This is coming from a commenter who believes brushing your teeth, and presumably oral hygiene in general, to be hype.
The most pop-culture conspiracy theories vastly overestimate the precision of the organization: they're more like painters than programmers. It's a whole lot of improv.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
tldr: Jim Morrison's dad started the Vietnam War when he falsely claimed he was attacked off the coast of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese.
What is the takeaway?
This is definitely a fitting conspiracy theory for our increasingly fascist times though.
Ed was at the end of his rope, an expression he detested. “There is no rope!”, he would scream at the laughing walls, “There is only the end. No hope; no rope.”
> "As a Komsomol activist, Kolomoyskyi was involved in the so-called "disco movement" - an attempt by the authorities to promote an ideological safe alternative to the growing, underground, rebroadcast and performance of "Anglo-American" rock music including, in the 80s, heavy metal and punk."
However, there is a great book about CIA guys creeping around Laurel Canyon, called Chaos [0]. It's filled with sources, research, and mostly solid inferences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAOS:_Charles_Manson,_the_CIA...
(then again, consider Epimenides: Linebarger is also a propaganda man)
I've been watching F1 for several decades and some key races are jazzed up to the point that one must actively suspend their disbelief. Not to mention Bernie Ecclestone straight up saying who's going to be champion and who isn't ever going to be one. It's all fake, dude. Unless you really believe some countries are thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much better at sports (and everything else) because they're just that awesome in every respect.
Providing facilities, medics, dietitians, etc. does not hurt, of course. Makes for great PR. Having your guys in charge of testing for dope helps create the actual results, though.
That said, if you truly believe superhumans exist, that's fine too. Even if it strikes me as rather naive. It helps patriotism and whatnot. A man needs his pride
So some unemployed painters tried their luck painting pictures a camera couldn't make.
If a candidate is psychic, wouldn't that be good to know?
You need to testing for Larges, not Mediums.
Do you have episodes of unexplainable lost-time? Maybe try setting up a surveillance camera at home so you can see when they activate you.
some of the things listed there apply to my experience, and others don't. the whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers.
The American security state - Pinkerton, etc - was created to deal with labor, and it was nearly-constantly trying to end-run around democratic oversight using whatever means it could: poisoning students with military-grade chemicals, allying with Luciano, squamming loins with notorious non-state actors (including actual Nazis), hiring squadrons of prostitutes, and on occasion - maybe, possibly - making some US citizens go away more permanently. Without even mentioning its adventures in the Americas at large. It's the height of schadenfreude we're living through a golden age of conspiracism without eyeballs on the horribly, horribly real historical conspiracies, who was behind them, and who continues to be.
(Or any other "real conspiracies" for that matter.)
?!?! I looked it up, but there are too many definitions... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Squam Is that a synonym for "knocking boots" ?!
edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Yes yes, it's a good thing according to good medical authority. But still, it's crassly dystopian too. Maybe we can thank "old leftist drug overuse" for normalizing us over that hump.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out
Just noting this because I wasn’t sure if this what was being referenced, so I looked it up . . .
But did people dislike the hippies because of their drug use, or did they dislike drug use because of the hippies?
https://spyscape.com/article/frank-olson-the-cias-secret-que...
Agency, as in there are hundreds of millions of third-worlders who have been conditioned to believe they have no Agency. Since grammar school.
Which the Agency itself isn't really any good at (at least since the 50's), but those in power locally are more than happy to exploit the boogeyman and make it part of the curricula.
Let’s not pretend the CIA is particularly good at anything other than overthrowing Latin American democracies.
and towards China in particular: https://chinanow.britishcouncil.cn/
Some on the left (and right I imagine) say these are an example of neo-colonialist neo-liberalist ideas and that does seem as conspiracyish as this article but if you imagine in 50 years time a politics article looking at the arts right now, then an archived series of these projects from our governments international arts organisations might well be included!
Or even Mondrian
I wouldn't put most of the legendary pieces on my wall unless you paid me.
edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art. Doesn't seem to matter how I phrase it, it's always offensive to someone that I can't see the undeniable beauty in popular art. Putting time and effort into something is a prerequisite for me to be in awe, but it does not automatically interest me. Many professional athletes put in far more time and effort into their craft to play a decorative game and I similarly don't care about their mastery of their strictly decorative achievements.
Personally I have a hard time valuing questions that have no wrong answer. Seems like a polite ritual at best and a waste of time at worst.
That being said, there are lots of intense and pretty drawings and paintings that obviously took a lot of skill to create. No need to expect inspiration. A lot of the language around "art" is a reflection of the self-regard of the people who own it.
> edit: it always tickles me the negative reactions I get when people hear my opinion on art.
People want to fit in, it's a survival skill. Public negative opinions about Marvel movies will get you death threats and accusations of trying to destroy companies for the sake of other companies.
I think you're probably touching the root cause, but it still stands to question how exactly people feel they're more fitted by publicly disagreeing with an anonymous person on the internet. I guess it's just a learned action in meatspace that incidentally carries over to the internet where it has no benefit and only detriment? Human behavior is always interesting.
Modernism is obsessed with truth and optimization, evolving toward an apex. Computing technology as a whole is modernist. Apple hardware design is a glaring example of a modernist pursuit (especially under Ive).
Which, ironically, makes it legitimately art. It's art because it's anti-art.
Also the beat poets, who were trying to write intent-free stream of consciousness texts, kind of like a token-prediction engine. :)
Also Picasso was a real commie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso#Political_views - also Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo.
The modern art they refer to in the article concerns different, post-1950 kinds...
The USA had the "Congress for Cultural Freedom", the Soviet Union had it's "World Peace Council", funny kind of influence peddling.
wikipedia has a list of "Communist front organizations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_front_organ...
and one for "CIA front organizations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Central_Intelligence_...
And nowadays the spooks are all busy with trolling on twitter (the taxpayers money is doing some real work :-) )
Nope, if anything is a psyop, it's fashionable nonsense. Fashionable nonsense neuters academics who would be revolutionaries and turns them into academic hipsters.
but we invented taco tuesday and family guy
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/taco-tuesday-trademark-t...
No, it's not. No more than other attempts, like assassinating Castro (man, that one is really a laughing stock if you read that one front to back) or their involvement in "war against drugs". Maybe they start it but had absolutely no control where it was going.
What happens when Adorno & Horkheimer become mainstream pop icons?
Rockefeller, in his ambition to elevate the visual allure of the lobby in the newly-constructed Rockefeller Center, enlisted Rivera to produce an imposing mural. The outcome was "Man At The Crossroads," an artwork of monumental scale and significance.
Rivera's work is a meticulous tapestry, deftly weaving myriad aspects of the social and scientific zeitgeist of his era. Echoes of Communism, an influence in Rivera's other works, can also be discerned here. The centerpiece of the composition features a worker, seemingly the master of the machinery surrounding him. This focal figure is presented beneath a colossal fist clutching an orb, a representation of atomic recombination and cellular division in an ongoing act of biological and chemical genesis.
Four propeller-like forms extend from the central figure towards the composition's corners, signifying light arcs emanating from large lenses that anchor the spatial edges. Rivera coined these as "elongated ellipses". They encapsulate cosmological and biological forces, such as erupting suns and cellular structures, symbolizing the revelations afforded by the telescope and the microscope.
Interwoven between these arcs are vignettes of contemporary social life. To the left, affluent society women are depicted indulging in cards and cigarettes. In stark contrast, on the right, we find Lenin amidst a diverse assembly of workers. Juxtaposed scenes of militaristic force and a Russian May Day rally laden with red flags encapsulate Rivera's contrasting societal visions – a decadent, jobless society, dispassionately observing escalating conflict, and Lenin ushering in a socialist utopia.
Classical statues tower behind the observers at the edges of the scene. The left bears an enraged Jupiter, his hand clutching a thunderbolt, severed by a lightning strike – an embodiment of the frontier of ethical evolution. Conversely, a headless seated Caesar on the right signifies the frontier of material development. These images were Rivera's symbolic defiance against superstition, advocating for the scientific mastery of nature and the overthrow of authoritarianism by the emancipated proletariat.
The mural's overt Communist themes caused a stir among certain American observers. When Rivera stood his ground against removing Lenin's depiction, Rockefeller retaliated by having the mural plastered over. Erased.
In the subsequent years, Rockefellers skill at erasing art made him a key figure in the CIA's initiative to suppress intellectual discourse within the art world. In pursuit of this endeavor, the agency orchestrated the flooding of galleries with abstract art, featuring indecipherable splashes of paint, thereby drowning out the voices of artists who dared to infuse their creations with thought-provoking messages
Shit. Strike that from the record. How do you delete comments?
Unless the psyop was itself a psyop? Would they do that to their own people?
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
From 45 Communist Goals, published 1958 in "The Naked Communist" and read into the Congressional Record in 1963. Worth checking out, much of it came to pass.
https://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/spcol/exhibitions/anti-comm/a...
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/white-citize...
https://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/spcol/exhibitions/anti-comm/a...
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/patriotic-americ...
https://usmspecialcollections.omeka.net/exhibits/show/antico...
I for one like having the ability to vote without paying a poll tax or taking a poll exam and drinking from any damn water fountain I wish, which are rights Segregationist White Supremacist orgs like PAY, the John Birch Society, and the Citizen Councils wanted only for White Protestant Anglo-Saxon Americans.
The fact you were able to pull up a primary document published by a movement from an era that is largely not taught in depth about is honestly very suspect, unless you are studying for a BA in American History, which I honestly doubt.
I see no particular reason to take this at face value.
>They weren't democrats or republicans
You know, if you think the whole world is either republican or democrat and anything not coming from those affiliations is suspect, then you have limited your world view pretty drastically.
> The fact you were able to pull up a primary document published by a movement from an era that is largely not taught in depth about is honestly very suspect, unless you are studying for a BA in American History, which I honestly doubt.
This as well. You're on a "hacker" forum, it is nothing unusual that people here are interested in fringe topics and find interesting sources outside the mainstream. Trying to pry into the identity of another poster to determine if he or she has the right to say certain things is beyond creepy. Have you considered a career at the CIA or other equivalent? From your comment you seem like a good fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov
The talk page is interesting as well as it shows that the same sentiment which most likely led some individuals to vote down this mentioning of Bezmenov here also leads some to try to get the article on Bezmenov deleted as "Not notable" [1], attempts to link him via his "popularity among the alt-right" to hoaxes like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and insinuating mentioning Bezmenov "recklessly promotes far-right conspiracy theory" [2], calling Bezmenov and his story a "CIA fabrication" [3] and again lamenting the fact that Bezemov's [sic.] ideas of ideological subversion are often used by the Alt-Right and Anti-Communists [4], thereby attempting to not only smear Bezmenov but also to link anti-communism with "alt-right".
Yes, Bezmenov is a source often used by those who want to show examples of attempted subversion by the Soviet Union, this is why that interview I linked to is a good fit in the context of a question on foreign interference.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yuri_Bezmenov#Not_notable?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yuri_Bezmenov#Popularity_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yuri_Bezmenov#Possibility...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yuri_Bezmenov#Conspiracy_...
The rest can be gleaned from the Wikipedia page on the author:
> W. Cleon Skousen ... was an American conservative author with the John Birch Society and a faith-based conspiracy theorist
I guess they had no clue how the American Psyche works. Japan sinks 6 vessels, U.S. drops the sun on Japan. Not once, but twice, for good measure. You'd think Russia would watch and learn. They haven't learned anything, even today.
And in general, american hegemony roughly aligned with interests of humanity as a whole, because with all it's downfalls and atrocities and ugliness, its still much better than the alternative.
lmao you flagged me for this?