The answer is: sort of, but not really. Government funding was used to promote American art internationally for the purposes of prestige and cultural power, but the movements themselves were not created by any institutions.
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.
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?!"
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).
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.
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.
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.
There is also a controversy with that piece by Duchamps; there is some evidence it was by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Oof, big flashbacks to conversations I wish I never had with essential oils advocates and religious fundamentalists.
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.
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.