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I know they are trying to create a catchy headline but just to be 100% clear, Modernism as a movement predates the existence of the CIA by > 50 years. Modernism in music, literature, art and architecture appears around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It went through many iterations by the mid 20th century and the birth of the CIA out of the wartime OSS in 1947.

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My thoughts, too, went to Luigi Russolo and early experimental electronic music, and experimental films of the 1920s. Obviously any counterculture can still be co-opted into the mainstream. See what is happening now with various civil rights movements being worked into corporate images (and the ensuing conservative backlash).

What happens when Adorno & Horkheimer become mainstream pop icons?

The article is obviously about postwar art.

Yeah, which is why I qualified my post in the first sentence. Maybe they should've titled it, "Was Postwar Modern Art a CIA Psyop" but obviously that's just not as clickable.

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