Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
>The rest of the world lived it's own life.
Perhaps, but this is not about what happened in Mongolian or Indonesian art scenes, but mostly focused on the cold war theater of US and Western Europe.
Yes, abstract expressionism, but also other mostly US-led scenes like pop art to a degree.
>Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time?
It had a US lead at the time, easier to explain US institutions promoting and do cross-continent exchanges and sponsorships, and conveniently apolitical compared to other art movements of the time.
>Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
Quite a lot, being from here, and familiar with both their history and the relevant literature.
A hardly a bold claim at all, it has been studied and reported in books such as "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press), "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War" (University of Chicago Press), "Pollock and After: The Critical Debate" (Harper Collins) and others, and of course the topic of TFA.
Your opposite claim would be the bold one.
The first book, which is also the canonical one on the subject, is not "written and published in USA for American reader". It's a book by a British historian, first published in the late 90s in Britain, then republished in the US (and all over Europe, there's German, French, Spanish etc versions).
The second book explicitly concerns the transition of power in the art scene and the interplay between Europe and the US in the same cold war period.
The third is broken in different essays, including one explicitly on "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War", and how it was used internationally.
All three are academic books, not some fringe conspiracy theories.
And these books, and others, have been translated, read, and discussed in Europe. I've read them, and hundred more on European 20th century art, which is besides the point, as most of the others are off topic, we're not discussing say Dada or Cubism or Arte Povera here, but something specific.
Anything to contribute besides being ad-hominem, wrong, and rude?
Eventually it evolved, sometimes people say "hey, I'm from DC" or "hey, I live in DC2" (that means the second largest city, Saint-Petersburg)
> Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe
As someone who is active in the German art scene, the understanding is not that clear-cut. Modern art, as I learned it, is "art in the modern period". So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
The term used more often (at least in Germany) is "contemporary art". Which translates to "everything after WW 2". I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
Contemporary art always refers to art from the specific period the speaker is living in, ie our present moment.
Ok, but you are reinforcing parent's point (which I agree with TBH).
We drew vastly more art. The kind you describe was just more likely to be preserved as the institutions they were on about and the buildings they resided in persisted.
It just so happens that a lot of the modern/contemporary art talked about is mostly the domain of professional art (and examples that say otherwise are often not even thought of as such like hippy tie dye clothing.)
We dont show them in museums tho.
> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).
Now I have to nitpick, too too :-)
According to my understanding on the usage of "contemporary art", this is a "time relative term", meaning it describes usually "what was usually/common around a given time/period"?
They're talking about the post 50s abstract expressionism and pop art movements.
Just because it says "modern art" doesn't mean it refers to any and all modern art, much less 19th century art or say cubism or dada.
'Humans are horrible', oh no I meant only that subset of 3 individuals, you should understand my context... thats weak excuse to be polite.
It shouldn't be attached to anything that can age out of this meaning.
> In the context of art history, modernity (Fr. modernité) has a more limited sense, modern art covering the period of c. 1860–1970.
It's more than a century old now.
"Modern art" in the 1950s/60s post-war sense means extreme abstraction with no realism at all.
Ironically abstraction can work in two directions - evocative messes like Pollock, or clean geometry and abstract functionalism in design and architecture.
The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic. And the artists were drunks and addicts who were easy to own.
The other direction became domestic and corporate design.
And probably also due to it being a counterpoint to the constructivist styles that were being actively promoted by Soviet authorities at the time.
Clinton was just ahead of the curve.
But I was trying to reach the person who left the parent comment.
And hitting them with a phrasing that is directly poststructuralist seemed to be the wrong approach since they appear to operate in a structuralist framing.
What it is not is obvious to derive from first principles ("says modern, so much mean current") or stuck to a single definition ("but historians call any art after the middle ages Modern").
But it is still trivial to pick the context in either use, and trivial for someone to read at least 1 paragraph about the "CIA psy-op" claim, whether it's true or not, and figure what it means by modern art there (it doesn't mean Van Gogh or Monet). People just want to comment without bothering.
However, when you tie the word "new" or in this case "modern" to a time period that was over a hundred years ago you are just setting yourself up for failure and have to make do with calling things "after new" or in this case "post modern". But then where will this end?
What was wrong with calling periods proper names like Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic?
Eras only get these proper names long after they're over. To people living during those eras, they were just "now".
Or as Aristotle would say, start with definitions.
I really do not get arguing about semantics. It is all arbitrary. You need to agree on what is meant to even intend on having a conversation.
There is a language comprehension issue in this thread. At no point does the title imply its invention, it does however imply it is about the CIA and it's a huge tell identifying the injection of personal bias into meaning through either lazy reading, internal personal grievances, or a lost in translation misunderstanding.
"modern art" is of larger scope than CIA; thus "CIA" is the stronger relevant subject matter which narrows the secondary subject and should be understood/read as "modern art in the CIA era" or " CIA era modern art". The "era" is derived by applying "CIA" to "modern art".
This is probably where the mis-read/mis-translation happened. Since "era" is not explicit, modern art narrowed to all things within CIA scope could imply the CIA had a department full of alternative lifestyle bohemian spys creating and spreading modern art (not far off though, they commissioned works and funded related entities). A basic knowing of the CIA would dismiss this as absurd.
However, a translation error happening here can turn "modern art created by the CIA" into "modern art invented by the CIA".
I think we can all agree that naming anything "modern" or "new" or "nu" (for new) is simply deeply dumbfucktarded.
GP talks about the 1860s: I'm sorry but nothing about the 1860s is "modern" in 2026. Just as nothing from 2026 shall be "modern" in 2160.
It's nearly as if at least one of the two hardest problems in computer science, naming things, applied to other things too.
Which is exactly the problem. If you're going to make an argument that depends on analyzing one very specific thing detached from its surrounding context, you have to actually address that context, and justify why you're ignoring it.
The claim that 1950s pop art was deliberately engineered by a CIA conspiracy for geopolitical purposes can't be sustained without explicitly arguing for why it isn't a natural evolution from the existing trends in art and design that were already prevalent at the time.
Socialist Realism was the name for the representational art promoted by Stalin, Mao & Kim. It was always a propaganda piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art
If there was anything that Default Country did better than Commieland, the CIA would promote it. Art? Sure. Why not, some people like that stuff.
Thanks for the new term.
'Mid 20th century' is when the explosion of mass media happened, and these concepts were globalized.
It's worth studying for sure, and frankly, it seems the CIA came to a reasonable conclusion. The backed art for literally the right reasons. Good on them.
however, i did wonder at the decor at my local thai restaurants and they were definitely using some ethnic pieces, and now I realize...
Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.
The obvious problem is that when the same group is committing vicious crimes and horrors, it's very hard to look at about anything they do and be like... well, at least folks were getting laid during Midnight Climax.
"Oh, hey, that's cute: the vicious monsters who torture people to death in a global network of black sites are manipulating us again by exporting pleasant videos of puppets teaching children".
Photography did that.
I didn't used to like pop-art, op-art, etc. I do now.
I suspect most things new take a while to sink in.
At the same time though, if you go somewhere like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, upon leaving that fantastic building it does occur to you that the whole thing is an outpost for American artistic culture, or if you want to frame it another way, American cultural imperialism because every artwork in there (pretty much, there’s a yayoi kusama mirror box for the instagrammers) is American and something of an modernist and contemporary assault against every tradition of European art, including Picasso. So to frame the whole of American artistic culture as the CIA’s doing is like the tail wagging the dog of a broader phenomenon – rich Americans in general funded this movement into existence and the CIA likely joined in.
Modern artists aim solely for originality. As a result modern art consists of nothing else. It's empty; fake. At the same time it does require ever increasing effort to find something superficially new; like crypto mining. That is still a fulltime job, that's true.
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
This isn't meant to be about the idea of modern art in general, not about modernist art, or a "history of art" compatible conception of the term.
So whether "modern art started with the invention of the film camera" and other such claims about the late 19th here is irrelevant.
In the context of TFA and the CIA-related discussion, "modern art" refers mainly to abstract expressionism and to a lesser degree pop art and conceptual art, in US and Western Europe.
That was the scene and its sub-scenes which dominated the Western galleries and art world in the post "cold" war period, and for layman uses (and even for several critical treatments), it was synonymous with modern art, in the sense of the fine arts, in general. Hence the use of the term.
That's the way the term "modern art" is used in this.
EDIT: Saachi works similar to the way boy and girl bands are created. They are not artists, but underpaid unknowns whose works are packaged, productized, propped up, marketed and sold like Kpop idols. It’s a machine.
I wouldn't use the nomer americana which is a grouping of styles itself becoming less comon.
Secondly I wouldn't ascribe intentionality to all if it. That's what made it so dangerous and imo destructive. It self-propagates. I saw people in the arts in turn instilling the idea that all these modern greats in some slightly different way pushed the boundaries with their slightly new thing and for that we should remember their name. To be avant garde was a quality in and of itself. The only quality. And it happened to diminish the need for certain skills. Understanding the origins, ideas, etc happened to become a form of social signaling. (this kind of art thoughtleader is typically not ascribed to a poor person detached from artistic cricles after all)
Barely a soul seemed to think there was something to the kind of expressive qualities we sought for thousands of years might have intrinsic value that was not derived from further abstracting things down or meaning that had to be taped on to be understood,, etc.
And so I saw so many people chasing their ego to either be different in ironically the same ways or mostly to just roll with the style du jour all without any kind of self reflection.
Also funilly enough I remember seeing an architect or 2 baffled that people liked certain classical styles because they were thought how these "incorrectly" took from previous even older styles. As if nobody could deconstruct their cubic creations in the same way.
Part of the design spec of the psyop, perhaps
But the deeper problem is that an average consumer simply doesn't care about quality. Look at how most people listen to the music - random radio with same 10 pop songs over and over again with ads in-between, while being stuck in traffic. They're not experiencing music, they just want something to fill the void and that's it.
And that's fine, people have different tastes, there's nothing wrong with it.
My first experience with furry was a Tumblr blog of a guy who reposted art he liked and had exactly the same taste as me. Tumblr is a dead wasteland now though.
You'll have to browse through a lot of trash, but once you get a decent list of artists you like, your experience will improve dramatically.
Sounds a little vulgar, but IMO you should start with things you find sexy because you'll enjoy it even if the quality isn't there. Once you get a foot in the door, you'll be able to look for decent art that isn't porn.
Also, artists tend to be overworked and overly sensitive, which creates a lot of drama. Just ignore that.
You have a strong opinion. I would highly implore you to learn more about art history and why art is the way it is today. You’ll learn why banana and duct tape is why it is.
What makes an art work museum worthy? It’s very rewarding to have that insight.
Not everyone gives about the class signaling that brings or the like or the insight that makes one say 'oooh i get it now' or how avant garde in a slightly new way the next pollock is. I think it's fitting how someone else compared it to the declinging returns of bitcoin mining. After Duchamp's Fountain, Cattelan's Comedian, Warhol's campbell cans,...what share still give a shit about definitional art or other similarly iterated on styles? Maybe you can make a piece about it.
Convincing post-war europe that they are outside the influence of the US was also a great psyop
Modern art is modern art because by the early 20th century, it was hard to do anything original in something resembling a traditional style.
It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music.
Arnold Schoenberg wasn't a psyop. If anything it is a comment on the lack of modern cultural sophistication and the way people relate to the world in terms of sensationalist narrative for click optimization.
I don't see ANY dearth of originality in American 12-tone music during the cold war. What are you meaning by this?
I am reluctant to believe stories like "The CIA created modern art", as it is just a single part, although a very influential part, of the movement.
I say this as somebody who is very cautious about believing anything and am quick to call things (probably incorrectly) propaganda or disseminated by paid actors.
My understanding is that the CIA influenced the rise of modern art over Soviet realism, eg, by hosting shows and bidding up prices.
That is “created” in the sense that a movement would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage, but not “created” as in invented absent an underlying cohort of sincere artists.
If you believe the CIA was an important and necessary part of the movement, you seem to agree they created.1 modern art, even if they co-opted rather than created.2 the style.
this seems entire implausible. Many of the expressionist, surrealist or modernist artists were European refugees who fled fascism, the government apparently spent less on their efforts than an average regional election today costs, and expressionism still exists.
This is the American equivalent of one of those 'are the Chinese behind this' conspiracies every time anything Chinese starts to be popular. Governments who can't get things done for billions apparently suddenly can invent entire art forms with a few million bucks.
No doubt there were people who thought abstract art would make for good advertisement for American liberalism, but no they did not invent, steer or even meaningfully influence it
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
The concept of Nuclear Winter first came up in the USA, then the Russians caught wind of it and claimed they had independently reached the same conclusions. This helped them turn public opinion against the deployment of more missile bases in Europe... conveniently after they had already deployed theirs.
But now I started to think this could be true to certain extent. There were collections of such jokes printed abroad and smuggled into USSR. This does not mean they were printed by CIA, of course. But there is also tone of those jokes.
They were not the kind of jokes that point out something like low quality of goods or services (Reagan retold a few of these; such jokes were widespread and absolutely legal, there were numerous official satirical magazines that had them in spades). These was, for example, a series of jokes about a certain Civil war figure. There was a movie about him ("Chapaev", last name) that was immensely popular in USSR. In the series of jokes he and his comrades appeared as the filthiest and stupidiest scoundrels. There also was a serie of jokes about "War and Peace" figures (Rostova, Bolkonsky, etc.), with exactly same approach.
What started that process was a rather dull and artificial joke that turned out to mock an end scene of some war movie. I somehow missed that movie in my youth, but I knew the title of it, the movie and the book it was based on were well known. But once I saw it I clearly saw that the joke was meant to mock the movie; there is no other explanation.
Thing is, the scene should not be mocked. William James wrote that a characteristic quality of a religious experience was a feeling of seriousness; "not all is vanity". This feeling was very alive in USSR, even though it was a formally atheist country. We clearly understood that as kids. Not because you will be punished, mind you, but because this will harm you.
With that understanding I reevaluated the other jokes and indeed the intent was same. I also remembered certain songs that also appeared about that time; they were called "emigrant songs" and, apparently, they were recorded in Russian neigbourhoods of New York. They were in fantastically bad taste; yet they were everywhere.
Bad taste and bad jokes don't need CIA; but now I think CIA indeed played a part by giving all that a much bugger scale that might have happened organically.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 - June 2023 (332 comments)
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 - June 2020 (7 comments)
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987770 (Feb 2025)
Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587547 - Aug 2019 (33 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602 (Oct 2015)
Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 - Aug 2015 (133 comments)
I thought this was well known. Like, the Men In Black movies literally have a scene lampshading this.
The result is the destruction of society, of the building blocks, what remain is atomic individuals and a central power structure that always control more and centralise.
Our roots was to worship Christ (self sacrifice for love and truth) with that sweept aside, we worship pleasure, ourselves, the intellect, etc. We are much easier to control than stuborn truth believer that are ready to die for it.
"All Art is Propaganda" is a well known quote by various authors - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/04/08/art-propaganda/
Also George Orwell wrote a set of essays under that name (though he was primarily indicating Language/Literature) - https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays
I would be surprised if there's anything which is of any interest to any meaningful group of humans which is not a PsyOp.
[1]: Global Intelligence Agency - because we know that they have deep reach into every nation at this point and are only accountable to themselves.
I was involved in the industrial/alternative club scenes in the 90's and the degrees of separation of those bands from what we would call obvious influence operations today are few. If someone were to design a cost effective machine for cultivating troubled loners into a recruitment pipeline for a sabotage and activism capacity, a few thousand dollars here and there to promote and exalt some drug addicts making angry subversive noise would be the way to do it. Night life and its various vices and perversions was such a fantastically successful anti-capitalist operation that if you ask a modern CIA agent what flag sits on their boss' desk today, they will tell you there is more than one.
In the words of John Lydon, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
Art can be a direction shaped with above methods.
With the Internet and some competing heavy-weights, it may no longer be an US soft superpower it was before, but it still retains its important quality: it's ubiquitous, ever-present, and so enormous it's hard to notice - much like fish don't think much about the water they swim in.
Some previous discussion:
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
I had to laugh out loud too when I read this.
Modern art started in the late 1800s, long before the CIA or its predecessor existed. Using this term to describe contemporary art, or abstract art more generally, is an (anti?) shibboleth that indicates you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I realize the article is about mid century artists, but I’m certain it’s being upvoted here because people think the title is referring to contemporary, 21st century art.
If you meant something more specific, like abstract expressionism, then again, it’s mostly just a continuation of previous trends. Sure, the government sponsored some things, but it’s not as if postwar American artists invented the entire concept of modern art (which is what the article seems to be implying.)
And if you meant very abstract / performance contemporary art, the kind of thing uninformed people like to describe as modern art, again, most of that got started in the 60s (with antecedents in the 10s, 20s, etc.) and was mostly by people the CIA thought were subversives.
Modern art was not a CIA psy op. Modern art precedes the CIA by a century. Mid-century American art was popularized in part by American government organizations. These are entirely different claims.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Abstract Expressionism was the pinnacle of modern art and was much more than a style or aesthetic. It was a total embrace of pure individuality. That's why it has been resisted by every social movement since. It is the essence of non-conformity. Political groups require conformity.
Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo
Your tax dollars, hard at work!
A lot of people misunderstand this and think it's some conspiracy to demoralize society and "erase Western culture". If that was true there would be witch hunts against traditional art and calls to destroy it.
When you look at the real abstract artists they used language about freedom to make art outside its traditional constraints and encouraged others to try it out, but I don't think any large group of them ever wanted to fully replace and condemn the old ways. Some definitely switched their style to fit in but as far as I know it was all voluntary.
RTFA. This is literally what the CIA did, to soft-blacklist marxists and prevent them from becoming successful artists
it both makes sense and seems very obvious that the CIA utilized an artistic movement as both a tool of internal domestic propaganda (excluding Soviet art which was incredible for its time due to actually being publicly funded) and to push soft power overseas by dangling inclusion in supposedly prestigious cultural institutions (ie mostly playthings of the rich, populated with the owned art of the rich with the blessing of the government which increased the cultural prestige and thus later sale value of the art)
a more honest title might be 'Is the way we perceive modern art influenced by Cold War American propaganda'? but I suppose that wouldn't have Gen Z and Alpha clicking through and learning how culturally bankrupt things are in the West, and how pervasive and invisibilized so much of our domestic propaganda is
another example of this might be the way nonviolence as a protest strategy just happened to be greatly encouraged by the rich and CIA-connected [0] [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmL7Ph4Us8o&lc
[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...
yes, it was
The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
> (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".
I just thought of mid 1800s, since around that time people got really experimental with different styles of painting.
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power.
But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.
This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.
The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree.
The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.
It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.
The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.
tl;dr Modern art existed before the CIA and even CIA predecessors did not originate it, but they did push it abroad to show that America is great because we put up with modern art made by socialists depite most americans disliking both the art and the artists
Hard to imagine today because this kind of weird art comes from just about everywhere with a few exceptions now.
Interesting to read about how it actually was the work of a few elite institutions that made this happen. Agreed the CIA angle is a bit weak, to me it's more a story about the Rockefellers and their compatriots who funded this stuff.
It is interesting they were taunting the Soviets by saying "look our artists are so free even we dont know wtf they are making but we support them!" rather than "look how amazing modern art is" lol
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
> In the late '90s, when Asia went through a huge financial crisis, South Korea's leaders decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. So the country's government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...
British Invasion was not a state thing.
- grocery stores
- NASA
- rock music
- psychedelics and hippies
- a strong middle class
- affordable vehicles and the highway system
- Hollywood movies
- Books
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
Right wing nutjobs who think the most important thing in the world is what exists between your legs. A few years ago there were news stories about a family that decided to raise their child "gender free" and that they would not announce the gender of the child to the world. The outrage that story produced was astonishing. People who would never in their entire life meet that kid were having fits because knowing what genitals that kid had was more important than anything else in their life.
Also the author of Harry Potter stories is rabidly transphobic. She's spending millions of dollars on propaganda and hate groups. It is so bad that none of the actors who played in the HP movies want anything to do with her. She's so angry at that that she's financing remakes of the movies with politically reliable/subservient staff & actors.
Funny how times have changed and more or less everyone on every side is fighting for the strength and survival of their own groupthink and little more.
They realize the majority of their beliefs already existed before they were born and will continue on after they're dead. They have nothing to add to the conversation while they are too busy fighting. They turn their focus to developing their ideas peacefully and let their subcultures flourish once again.
This isn't the first cycle and won't be the last. The last major cycle was in the 20th century due to broadcast media. I think people sometimes forget how relatively young the internet is.
there's a class of topics where disagreement means the death and dispair of one side.
hoping to live and let live, with a disagreeing party that doesn't "let live", is a fool's errand.
I'm saying that every time we have new media there are opportunists bugging everyone else that normally wouldn't care. Time and energy are precious. Humanity's default state is, and should be, ignorance and apathy.
If those last two words boil your blood, you gotta take a look at the mirror and reconsider why. You don't have to reply. You don't even have to remember anything I'm writing here. Just let go and be free. That doesn't have to mean you agreed/disagreed with me. You can in fact put the genie back in the bottle by completely abandoning it.
You lie today, you lied then.
Same with "let my people go" for the Soviet jews, it was more about draining the "human capital" from USSR.