Some people have reported CIA involvement in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had a great deal of influence on the direction that literary fiction took in post-WWII America. I'm inclined to believe that such projects were likely the playthings of a few dilettantes in high places--spymasters with subscriptions to Commentary and Partisan Review--rather than a serious attempt at stifling dissent, or discrediting socialism, or cultivating soft power, or whatever.
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.
This piece offers a limited perspective on what happened. There was quite a lot more than you can read about from other sources, such as this. [1] It wasn't just funding. The CIA setup an entire propaganda network, the 'Propaganda Assets Inventory', "which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organizations."
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]
This is very weird once you realize the concerns of real censors in the Soviet Union and USA were very similar - they usually cared about not depicting authority figures in a negative light as well as depicting criminals positively - as well as your typical prudish and puritanical concerns.
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.
yeah this feels like it takes the term “psy-op” to mean anything a government supports that isn’t war? by this broad of a definition ambassadors and latin languages are also psy-ops
It was not created as a psy-op, however it got out of obscurity as a psy-op.
I like to think that without government funding, art like 20 meters of a wall covered in cardboard boxes or tomato soup cans wouldn't take off.
> 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 not sure it follows that some here think art is a joke. The Cold War lineage of many technologies like the internet and GPS is even more direct, and people don't think those are a joke. It's just a fascinating theory.
There's a book on this called The Cultural Cold War[1]. I tried reading it but (embarrassingly) I don't know enough about artistic and literary figures in the mid-20th century to follow along with all the names it drops. Seemed interesting, though.
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.
The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
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.
> The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
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...
I don't think the CIA needs to clandestinely fund an entire art movement as a cover for money laundering, though. That seems a bit outlandish.
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.
Any high priced asset that's easy to move with few questions asked is a great tool for money laundering. One of the largest tools is real estate, which may be one reason you see a lot of unoccupied houses and condos in certain expensive cities.
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.
Government wasn't just throwing money at art...Could be the other way around. Back then what was stopping the CIA from covertly laundering money through art? They've cleaned money with worse.
It's not just that modern art started well before the CIA existed, but the article also conveniently forgets to mention how modern art subverted communism.
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.
If it is generally agreed that soviets, fascists, nazis used modern art to pursue their ends (new objectivity etc) I find it implausible that US intelligence wouldn't respond in kind. Of course that doesn't mean that the manner of response detailed by this article is accurate.
The conspiratorial view is that people were numbed by meaningless abstract art when they could have been engaging with didactic social realist works that would have convinced them to become communist. Hard to falsify but I’m not sure how credible it is.
The React analogy doesn’t work, React is used because developers find it more productive to use. On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?” so it is interesting to explore why it became very expensive and popular with elites despite the popular reaction.
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?
I don’t think it is much to do with some nefarious plan to defeat social realism so much as they funded talented artists and talented artists happened to be bored with old forms/find them irrelevant and they wanted to experiment with something new.
> On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?”
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.
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'."
It's not a mysterious occult goal. The web is now broken with JavaScript disabled, and Facebook has cemented a place in your browser to run their tracking code. It's pretty hard to believe that that was an intended consequence.
React was released back in 2012/2013. The web was already broken without JavaScript back then, and had been for quite some time. Remember jQuery? And FB placing tracking codes in cookies has nothing to do with React.
Let's see: Modern art starts somewhere around 1860 until 1970's. The term modern art was presumably first used in writing in the 1890's for French painters Coubert and Manet.The CIA was founded in 1947. Even MoMa predates the CIA by 18 years. So the answer must be no.
Eh, not really, seeing as those pre-existing organizations were themselves relatively recent wartime creations. The Office of Strategic Services was created in '42, the CIA in '47. "Intelligence" in the American sphere existed in an ad hoc manner up until that point - during WW1 the US mostly relied on the Brits, and the personal insights and observations of ambassadors or military attaches.
Yep there’s a whole industry around this too, you can watch these high end art auctions live where all the people in the room “bidding” are just representing the real bidders by proxy. It can get dark pretty quickly though if you start imagining what may actually be buying.
Considering the story of the Glomar Explorer, its astonishing just how much can the CIA hide in plain sight.
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).
Speaking out of my ass: my understanding was that certain branches of abstract expressionism were so, essentially, but it's difficult to apply the suspicion to ALL of modern/postmodern art, considering that so much of it was developed or influenced by artistic movements outside the temporal and geographic purview of the CIA (particularly pre-WWII European (post)modern art and its influences in Asian and African forms). Also, it wouldn't be the first time influential entities boosted controversial media in a successful bid for a sort of cultural engineering. (I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I'm actually referring to, "Woodrow Wilson screening 'Birth of a Nation' at the White House.")
(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.)
This is one of my favorites. Many here correctly point out that modern art was not created by the CIA and that's certainly laughable.
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.
Even if we knew it was, would anything change? People have built their careers on this stuff. Ten or twenty years ago I laughed at some things that are now just mainstream and normal - people do this stuff, they hire other people who do this stuff, one day you wake up and it's industry best practice and you have to fall in line.
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.
heh if this was true imagine the poor agents tasked with carrying it out, god what an awful job. "you want me to do what?!? I thought i was going to be behind enemy lines with a tiny camera at a fancy party like in the movies.."
Or selling weapons to rebels to try to topple Socialist leaning countries in hopes of being able to then bogart their resources for private profit. Or yeah tiny spy cam in a tux.
I have had the "Emperor wears no clothes" reaction to much of so-called modern art. Much of it seemed like gaslighting or sh*t tests for snobs obsessed with class signalling and Having The Right Connections or Causes. Rather than a demonstration of any real masterful skill, rare talent or artifact of relentless practice or an eye-for-perfection, of decades-long study or trial-and-error.
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.)
Here are three things that well connected Old Money types like: collecting art, being on the boards of nonprofits, and serving in high-level government positions. Not surprising that a Rockefeller might do all three.
I found this book pretty unconvincing, with way too few sources and way too many flimsy inferences.
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.
The worst/most-impressive part is how difficult it is to even raise this subject without triggering everyone's thought-terminating partisan programming
What makes me suspicious is that disco never "died" in europe in the same way it did in the States...
(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)
That event always seemed so weird to me. I’m not the biggest fan of disco (some of the old and new stuff is danceable) but isn’t blowing up a crate of records similar in spirit to book burning?
Not really. There was a real attack (provoked by the US) on Aug 2nd, and Johnson didn't want any evidence before escalating. Johnson even lied to Congress and the public about his plans before attacking. It's clear he would have used any excuse he could gin up.
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.”
I recently came across a reference to this kind of thing going on in Europe, although it was more about controlling what music was popular based on some notion of what was 'safe' for the youth. The billionaire in question (Ukraine's second richest at one point) was a major behind-the-scenes actor in both pre- and post-2014 Ukraine, a backer of Zelensky at one point, but now safely on the official US/NATO-reviled list so we can talk about him:
> "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."
That's a wildly overstated headline. Modern art goes back to the early 19th century and there were artists and patrons across the world long before the CIA. It's entirely plausible that they saw the rise of modern art as a useful vehicle to propagandize but it's ridiculous to say the entire thing was an OP.
This. Sure all three letter agencies need avenues to shuffle large somes of grey and black market cash around, art is convenient for that... Music and movies too. An extra plus for hiding messaging and all that... But I wouldn't view these operators to be as all encompassing as stories like these make them out to be... The next step is crap like "Leonardo da Vinci was actually a cia spy recruited by the freemasons", and once you go that far you're one cardboard sign and a roll of tinfoil away from an institution.
If you like this kind of question, I highly recommend the Wind of Change podcast, about whether The Scorpions song of the same name was written by the CIA. Super entertaining!
I feel about this the way I feel about most so called conspiracy theories. I'm certain intelligence agencies are involved something similar to this. It would be really surprising if they didn't avail themselves of this huge means of influence. They spend all day wondering about how to influence. But I'm more skeptical that the conspiracy theorist actually managed to catch the intelligence agency's activity in this particular case.
In Linebarger's book Psychological Warfare, he points out that asking propaganda men (in his defense, they probably were almost all men ca. 1947, and I suspect he may even have referred to specific men, eg Edward Bernays) about their work is highly unlikely to result in an unspun answer.
(then again, consider Epimenides: Linebarger is also a propaganda man)
Modern Art was not a CIA Psy-Op, because modern art is older than the CIA. Modern art started around the 1870s and was in full swing at the start of the 20th century. The CIA was founded in 1947.
Nobody is accusing them of coming up with the styles. They just found the emptiest artistic movements with the least to say and flooded them with money and positive criticism.
still not sure if it was related but in elementary school in the 90s I was put in a "gifted" program which involved, on at least one occasion, wearing headphones in a dimly-lit room and being tested with Zener cards. I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.
The classic work on this is "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond" by Lee & Shain. The Chapter "In the Beginning There Was Madness" covers the crazy era of MK-ULTRA (and the Frank Olson case, in which the CIA fed LSD to MKULTRA collaborators in the biological warfare program, where Olson worked - he then had a breakdown of some sort and wanted to quit the program and perhaps go public, so the CIA hit him in the head with a hammer and threw him out of a high-rise (probably, anyway) and called it a suicide for several decades).
Something the post-Boomer generations have been talking about more and more: the fact that the "tune in, turn on" movement wasn't coming from inside the house, so to speak. The old leftists still get very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations. They had ceded the field to reactionaries and identitarians (both allies of capital, of course), the effects of which we're dealing with to this day.
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.
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.
Regardless of what you think of this, there is a related idea worth considering: hegemony. Whether it is organic or confected, the idea that powerful groups within societies create and export ideas to other groups in society in a way that cements their own power or breaks a competing group's.. isn't new, and is fairly clearly the case whether we look at art, or tech, or media ownership.
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.
When I studied art history in school, a major theme was that most of the artists from long ago that we have heard of did some kind of work for whoever was in power, to make money, to create their masterpieces.
Let’s not pretend the CIA is particularly good at anything other than overthrowing Latin American democracies.
Wikipedia suggests Modern begins in the 1860s; the parent post is absolutely correct that it’s more the patronage rather than the artists or styles that drive classification in this case. Lots of things are disrupting the patronage of art around this time, especially photography, and changing markets for art result in very different kinds of art being produced.
I cannot comment as to whether the CIA is particularly good or bad at anything, but what I will say is that they are particularly effective at guiding domestic policy and operations.
We can see what our governments are encouraging towards other countries quite easily and openly today. For example in the UK you can see organisations like the British Council (The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities): https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/news
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!
Patronage, fine art, and propaganda have always been intertwined. It is so fundamental to the subject that it's in the textbooks. This article could be pulled from the course text for intro to modern art.
Lots of programmers get bored of writing simple line-of-business code and find ways to make it more interesting for themselves. It doesn't generally lead to a program that's better for the end user though.
Modernism is ubiquitous. Likely your furniture, computers, cars, and home architecture are heavily modernist unless you explicitly seek out classical stuff.
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).
And the most modernist form of art now is AI generated art. Pure form and aesthetic, but no real meaning or intent, like a face in a mirror, something shaped like human meaning but utterly devoid of it, manufactured like so much else of our reality.
Which, ironically, makes it legitimately art. It's art because it's anti-art.
Mondrian rules! In my youth I tiled the bathroom in my house in a Mondrian pattern. Mostly white, lowering the cost since white tiles were much cheaper than red yellow and blue.
Yes and no. On one hand, my social class and upbringing almost command that I should find beauty in Van Gogh and Picasso's works. I defer to the masters on matters I do not understand, but it's not where my personal taste and love really lie.
Picasso was a communist and his art was representational. His form of 'modernism' has nothing to do with the kind of actual nonsense that the CIA wanted to push.
The contra to this nonsense was state-controlled and heavily censored - as much as I like Polish school of poster, or overall "tidyness" of communal spaces in post-communist areas, it was (to say it mildly) stifling creativity.
This went along with tons of money to left-wing anticommunist/antisoviet writers and scholars (financing a bunch of elite literary journals that no one read, but looked good enough on resumes to get people into the NYRB, Guardian, etc..) If you're on the left, but not a Leninist, don't fall for the flattery of institutions. There are people spending the integrity of naive idealists in order to advance military and strategic goals.
The IDF reads the works of Deleueze and Guattari for inspiration on how to do urban warfare. I always laugh when critical theory influenced folks try to claim they're "anti-authoritarian".
Nope, if anything is a psyop, it's fashionable nonsense. Fashionable nonsense neuters academics who would be revolutionaries and turns them into academic hipsters.
Yes! On Huey Lewis and the News they seemed a little too willing to cash in on the late seventies/early eighties taste for New Wave, and the album - though it's still a smashing debut - seems a little too stark, too punk.
And Back to the Future, arguably the greatest movie/trilogy of all time and a distinctly American epic, which also featured several Huey Lewis and the News songs.
Agreed. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm genuinely surprised that the article neglected to mention the intriguing story of Rockefeller Plaza and the artist Diego Rivera.
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
TLDR: CIA openly admits it controlled art, philosophy, scholarship, and theory to steer leftists, and along with orgs like USAID and NED openly fund such projects today. Who can guess what they do in secret.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
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.
It was published by the "Patriotic American Youth" - the youth wing of the precursor of the John Birch Society and affiliated with the (white) Citizens Council Movement, which was formed following Brown v Board of Education.
Yeah, it's fascinating how frequently the paranoid wingnuts of the past turned out to be right. Then you have people like Aldous Huxley and things like the Jaffe memo, painting basically the same picture but from an "inside" perspective.
It's a summary of an FBI agent's report "Naked Communism". I'm thankful they were motivated to amplify the FBI's findings because the goals are heinous. And if we all agree the goals are heinous then I don't see anything left to contend with. If we can't agree they are heinous then I guess the communist agenda is alive and well.
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative who defected to the United States in the early 70s who has some choice words to say on this subject, words which turned out to be more than prophetic. It is worth watching the whole interview, about 1 hour 20 minutes in which he laid out the four stages of ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within.
Wow. Check out no: 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engage in atomic war.
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.
32. "Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc."
It's frightening to realize that western society has had such powerful totalitarian elements working behind the scenes under the banner of free markets and meritocracy. No wonder everything feels fake.
Occams razor: a much simpler explanation, not disproved by anything in this article, would be that CIA saw that sincere and powerful american and western art was already capturing hearts and minds for effectively, and decided to empower it, since this process aligned with its goals.
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.
No, I didn't, but it's a silly argument. An option doesn't need need to be good in order to be best, just like a number doesn't need to be positive in order to be the maximum of the set.
Discussed (a bit) at the time (of the article):
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1891222 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)
Others?
Some people have reported CIA involvement in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which had a great deal of influence on the direction that literary fiction took in post-WWII America. I'm inclined to believe that such projects were likely the playthings of a few dilettantes in high places--spymasters with subscriptions to Commentary and Partisan Review--rather than a serious attempt at stifling dissent, or discrediting socialism, or cultivating soft power, or whatever.
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
Did you read the JSTOR piece? The Partisan Review was funded by the CIA. They weren't reading it. They were writing it.
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^ this guy moderates
Did you ever posted how exactly do you find a similar posts despite them having a very different URIs?
Yup - lots of links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35668525
HN search is actually very good. You can even use Google for that:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+%22modern+art%22+site%3A...
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.
This piece offers a limited perspective on what happened. There was quite a lot more than you can read about from other sources, such as this. [1] It wasn't just funding. The CIA setup an entire propaganda network, the 'Propaganda Assets Inventory', "which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organizations."
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-...
This is very weird once you realize the concerns of real censors in the Soviet Union and USA were very similar - they usually cared about not depicting authority figures in a negative light as well as depicting criminals positively - as well as your typical prudish and puritanical concerns.
Splashes of colors and abstract geometrical shapes open to interpretation is about as far from political dissent and commentary as you can get.
EXACTLY!
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 see this as no different than the Renaissance being funded by Italian bankers and the church.
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yeah this feels like it takes the term “psy-op” to mean anything a government supports that isn’t war? by this broad of a definition ambassadors and latin languages are also psy-ops
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What was US values back then? If it was fighting USSR then it was a psy-op.
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It was not created as a psy-op, however it got out of obscurity as a psy-op. I like to think that without government funding, art like 20 meters of a wall covered in cardboard boxes or tomato soup cans wouldn't take off.
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People move in the direction the money is flowing from. You can basically dictate what gets produced by directing money, so it's not just promoting.
Jazz too!
The CIA might have promoted jazz, but the precursor to the DEA handcuffed Billie Holliday to a bed and withheld her methadone until she died:
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.”
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Makes sense. And makes sense this plays on HN. "Art is a joke" plays well with engineer types. Scared of what you don't understand?
Scared?
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.
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I'm a painter/illustrator. Lots of art, especially post-abstract expressionism, is definitely a joke.
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I'm not sure it follows that some here think art is a joke. The Cold War lineage of many technologies like the internet and GPS is even more direct, and people don't think those are a joke. It's just a fascinating theory.
> Scared of what you don't understand?
Oof, big flashbacks to conversations I wish I never had with essential oils advocates and religious fundamentalists.
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I am not scared of tax avoidance techniques.
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There's a book on this called The Cultural Cold War[1]. I tried reading it but (embarrassingly) I don't know enough about artistic and literary figures in the mid-20th century to follow along with all the names it drops. Seemed interesting, though.
[1] https://thenewpress.com/books/cultural-cold-war
Also
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.
> but just as ideologically - as opposed to creatively - directed
And about as bloody, too.
The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
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.
> The government threw money at the arts in the mid-20th-century to show up the USSR and people are reading too much into it. If classicism had been the thing in the middle of the 20th century they would have funded that instead.
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...
I don't think the CIA needs to clandestinely fund an entire art movement as a cover for money laundering, though. That seems a bit outlandish.
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.
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Any high priced asset that's easy to move with few questions asked is a great tool for money laundering. One of the largest tools is real estate, which may be one reason you see a lot of unoccupied houses and condos in certain expensive cities.
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.
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Like NFTs, it could be money laundering, pumping, or both?
Government wasn't just throwing money at art...Could be the other way around. Back then what was stopping the CIA from covertly laundering money through art? They've cleaned money with worse.
The fact that you're calling it reactive programming, instead of MVC, shows that Facebook's psyop was at least partially successful.
WTF? It's very different from MVC.
It's not just that modern art started well before the CIA existed, but the article also conveniently forgets to mention how modern art subverted communism.
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.
If it is generally agreed that soviets, fascists, nazis used modern art to pursue their ends (new objectivity etc) I find it implausible that US intelligence wouldn't respond in kind. Of course that doesn't mean that the manner of response detailed by this article is accurate.
The conspiratorial view is that people were numbed by meaningless abstract art when they could have been engaging with didactic social realist works that would have convinced them to become communist. Hard to falsify but I’m not sure how credible it is.
The React analogy doesn’t work, React is used because developers find it more productive to use. On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?” so it is interesting to explore why it became very expensive and popular with elites despite the popular reaction.
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?
I don’t think it is much to do with some nefarious plan to defeat social realism so much as they funded talented artists and talented artists happened to be bored with old forms/find them irrelevant and they wanted to experiment with something new.
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> On the other hand people’s initial reaction to much modern art is “what the hell? you call this art?”
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.
And also HTMX, Angular, or Vue could take over and erase React tomorrow and no one here would be especially surprised.
Is this where I put Betteridge's law?
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'."
I came into the comments thinking about Betteridges law and hoping to see it near the top and I wasn’t disappointed.
Pretty much any article posted to HN with a “?” At the end that’s not a AskHN prefix should get that response.
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I don’t know if it’s that simple.
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.
It's not a mysterious occult goal. The web is now broken with JavaScript disabled, and Facebook has cemented a place in your browser to run their tracking code. It's pretty hard to believe that that was an intended consequence.
React was released back in 2012/2013. The web was already broken without JavaScript back then, and had been for quite some time. Remember jQuery? And FB placing tracking codes in cookies has nothing to do with React.
Let's see: Modern art starts somewhere around 1860 until 1970's. The term modern art was presumably first used in writing in the 1890's for French painters Coubert and Manet.The CIA was founded in 1947. Even MoMa predates the CIA by 18 years. So the answer must be no.
That's nitpicky, seeing as CIA was created as a consolidation of several preexisting organizations.
Eh, not really, seeing as those pre-existing organizations were themselves relatively recent wartime creations. The Office of Strategic Services was created in '42, the CIA in '47. "Intelligence" in the American sphere existed in an ad hoc manner up until that point - during WW1 the US mostly relied on the Brits, and the personal insights and observations of ambassadors or military attaches.
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The article mentions the Advancing American Art program. You can read more about it here: https://brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/hcm/7/1/article-p971_...
seems like a genius way to legitimately funnel dark funding.
you can literally invent million dollar excuses for value transfers to arbitrary individuals.
Yep there’s a whole industry around this too, you can watch these high end art auctions live where all the people in the room “bidding” are just representing the real bidders by proxy. It can get dark pretty quickly though if you start imagining what may actually be buying.
This is the case for pretty much all auctions though. Not everyone has the ability to be physically present in the auction room.
> you can watch these
Where?
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Except most of this art was legitimate capital A Art. Existing in the Art World.
Let's not dismiss all modern art as fake. As popular of a philistine take that is amongst engineer types.
Considering the story of the Glomar Explorer, its astonishing just how much can the CIA hide in plain sight.
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).
Since spying requires inordinate amounts of untraceable funds, I wonder just how many CIA personnel have amassed huge private fortunes this way.
See also: art in embassies program
Speaking out of my ass: my understanding was that certain branches of abstract expressionism were so, essentially, but it's difficult to apply the suspicion to ALL of modern/postmodern art, considering that so much of it was developed or influenced by artistic movements outside the temporal and geographic purview of the CIA (particularly pre-WWII European (post)modern art and its influences in Asian and African forms). Also, it wouldn't be the first time influential entities boosted controversial media in a successful bid for a sort of cultural engineering. (I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I'm actually referring to, "Woodrow Wilson screening 'Birth of a Nation' at the White House.")
(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.)
This is one of my favorites. Many here correctly point out that modern art was not created by the CIA and that's certainly laughable.
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.
I refuse to believe that Alegria/Corporate Memphis/Globohomo art isn't a psyop to demoralize populations with how hideous it is.
Even if we knew it was, would anything change? People have built their careers on this stuff. Ten or twenty years ago I laughed at some things that are now just mainstream and normal - people do this stuff, they hire other people who do this stuff, one day you wake up and it's industry best practice and you have to fall in line.
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 don't want the think-pieces about it to end until it's gone for good. It offends my eyes.
heh if this was true imagine the poor agents tasked with carrying it out, god what an awful job. "you want me to do what?!? I thought i was going to be behind enemy lines with a tiny camera at a fancy party like in the movies.."
Andy Warhol was absolutely sick of it, and running out of ideas, and begging to be brought back in: https://youtu.be/1MbvNXZL5f0
Or selling weapons to rebels to try to topple Socialist leaning countries in hopes of being able to then bogart their resources for private profit. Or yeah tiny spy cam in a tux.
I have had the "Emperor wears no clothes" reaction to much of so-called modern art. Much of it seemed like gaslighting or sh*t tests for snobs obsessed with class signalling and Having The Right Connections or Causes. Rather than a demonstration of any real masterful skill, rare talent or artifact of relentless practice or an eye-for-perfection, of decades-long study or trial-and-error.
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.)
Lots of children are telling the (elite) crowd the emporor is naked but they want to continue pretending so hard they wont budge.
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.
Here are three things that well connected Old Money types like: collecting art, being on the boards of nonprofits, and serving in high-level government positions. Not surprising that a Rockefeller might do all three.
Nowadays there's bitcoin/etc, so art/collectibles as value store are taking it on the nose.
These are mere personal preferences. Any connection to a broader agenda is a conspiracy theory.
Now do Rock music https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Scenes-Inside-Canyon-Laurel/dp/...
I found this book pretty unconvincing, with way too few sources and way too many flimsy inferences.
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...
see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1hv5P4SwbU
Now do feminism
https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy
CIA does feminism: https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1429188218424078...
Now do news media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Cooper#Early_career
The worst/most-impressive part is how difficult it is to even raise this subject without triggering everyone's thought-terminating partisan programming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Carlson
https://theweek.com/speedreads/689969/tucker-carlson-tried-j...
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Now do tucker Carlson. https://www.mintpressnews.com/tucker-carlson-biography-nicar...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKTFfT4sMhQ
> There's this guy from the CIA and he's creeping around Laurel Canyon
Makes me look at things like Disco Demolition Night in a new light.
What makes me suspicious is that disco never "died" in europe in the same way it did in the States...
(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)
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That event always seemed so weird to me. I’m not the biggest fan of disco (some of the old and new stuff is danceable) but isn’t blowing up a crate of records similar in spirit to book burning?
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This is a great place to start:
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.
Not really. There was a real attack (provoked by the US) on Aug 2nd, and Johnson didn't want any evidence before escalating. Johnson even lied to Congress and the public about his plans before attacking. It's clear he would have used any excuse he could gin up.
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Johnson wanted to go to war, eventually some excuse would have been found.
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Where are the facts that back this up? Shouldn't there be disclosed evidence by now? Wasn't the counter culture under surveillance regularly?
This is definitely a fitting conspiracy theory for our increasingly fascist times though.
> Shouldn't there be disclosed evidence by now?
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.”
And The X-Files was a long ad.
This is one of my favorite rabbit holes to go down, it's nuts.
I recently came across a reference to this kind of thing going on in Europe, although it was more about controlling what music was popular based on some notion of what was 'safe' for the youth. The billionaire in question (Ukraine's second richest at one point) was a major behind-the-scenes actor in both pre- and post-2014 Ukraine, a backer of Zelensky at one point, but now safely on the official US/NATO-reviled list so we can talk about him:
> "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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihor_Kolomoyskyi
What?
The book the OP links to does make a good case of the same influence being used by the CIA as the OOP link makes with modern art… if that makes sense.
That's a wildly overstated headline. Modern art goes back to the early 19th century and there were artists and patrons across the world long before the CIA. It's entirely plausible that they saw the rise of modern art as a useful vehicle to propagandize but it's ridiculous to say the entire thing was an OP.
This. Sure all three letter agencies need avenues to shuffle large somes of grey and black market cash around, art is convenient for that... Music and movies too. An extra plus for hiding messaging and all that... But I wouldn't view these operators to be as all encompassing as stories like these make them out to be... The next step is crap like "Leonardo da Vinci was actually a cia spy recruited by the freemasons", and once you go that far you're one cardboard sign and a roll of tinfoil away from an institution.
If you like this kind of question, I highly recommend the Wind of Change podcast, about whether The Scorpions song of the same name was written by the CIA. Super entertaining!
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/
I feel about this the way I feel about most so called conspiracy theories. I'm certain intelligence agencies are involved something similar to this. It would be really surprising if they didn't avail themselves of this huge means of influence. They spend all day wondering about how to influence. But I'm more skeptical that the conspiracy theorist actually managed to catch the intelligence agency's activity in this particular case.
This is basically every sports fan theory that every game is rigged on the basis of a few point shaving scandals.
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If would be so cool if it is true! Well, is it?
In Linebarger's book Psychological Warfare, he points out that asking propaganda men (in his defense, they probably were almost all men ca. 1947, and I suspect he may even have referred to specific men, eg Edward Bernays) about their work is highly unlikely to result in an unspun answer.
(then again, consider Epimenides: Linebarger is also a propaganda man)
guess you'll have to listen!
Brad Troemel covered this pretty well on patreon, here's the preview https://www.instagram.com/p/CVfvbpwAoMZ/
Modern Art was not a CIA Psy-Op, because modern art is older than the CIA. Modern art started around the 1870s and was in full swing at the start of the 20th century. The CIA was founded in 1947.
A theory I like is that "modern art" was triggered by photography making a lot of painters unemployed around the 1870s.
So some unemployed painters tried their luck painting pictures a camera couldn't make.
I wonder what this generation's modern art response to AI art will be.
Nobody is accusing them of coming up with the styles. They just found the emptiest artistic movements with the least to say and flooded them with money and positive criticism.
Wait, you mean that scene in Men In Black 3 wasn't a joke?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MbvNXZL5f0
If you haven't read about MKUltra its worth a read too. Looks like the CIA helped to make LSD popular in the 60s https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...
still not sure if it was related but in elementary school in the 90s I was put in a "gifted" program which involved, on at least one occasion, wearing headphones in a dimly-lit room and being tested with Zener cards. I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.
That was the first test. Those who responded went on to the next level, which is goat staring.
Same. I'd forgotten about it. For me this happened around 1970.
I've always wanted to pull out some Zener cards in the middle of a programming interview.
If a candidate is psychic, wouldn't that be good to know?
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> I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.
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.
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I've seen these programs discussed on 4chan and reddit -- try "GATE conspiracy"
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Were you in NYC by chance?
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[dead]
That was well covered in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At least the "make LSD popular" part.
The classic work on this is "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond" by Lee & Shain. The Chapter "In the Beginning There Was Madness" covers the crazy era of MK-ULTRA (and the Frank Olson case, in which the CIA fed LSD to MKULTRA collaborators in the biological warfare program, where Olson worked - he then had a breakdown of some sort and wanted to quit the program and perhaps go public, so the CIA hit him in the head with a hammer and threw him out of a high-rise (probably, anyway) and called it a suicide for several decades).
https://spyscape.com/article/frank-olson-the-cias-secret-que...
Something the post-Boomer generations have been talking about more and more: the fact that the "tune in, turn on" movement wasn't coming from inside the house, so to speak. The old leftists still get very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations. They had ceded the field to reactionaries and identitarians (both allies of capital, of course), the effects of which we're dealing with to this day.
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.
> “tune in, turn on”
“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 . . .
> squamming loins
?!?! 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" ?!
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> very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations
But did people dislike the hippies because of their drug use, or did they dislike drug use because of the hippies?
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I don't know a lot about Pinkertons, is there a good book or a documentary to find out more?
(Or any other "real conspiracies" for that matter.)
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And now everybody's on antidepressants.
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.
Regardless of what you think of this, there is a related idea worth considering: hegemony. Whether it is organic or confected, the idea that powerful groups within societies create and export ideas to other groups in society in a way that cements their own power or breaks a competing group's.. isn't new, and is fairly clearly the case whether we look at art, or tech, or media ownership.
Central Intelligence... Agency.
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.
People who spend money because they have to have a hard time understanding people who spend money because they're bored.
When I studied art history in school, a major theme was that most of the artists from long ago that we have heard of did some kind of work for whoever was in power, to make money, to create their masterpieces.
Let’s not pretend the CIA is particularly good at anything other than overthrowing Latin American democracies.
They also were good at meddling in Australian politics, including overthrowing one of our best Prime Ministers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_t...
Dumb question: what counts as modern art? Is this a particular style, as opposed to post modernism? What defines. And who are the important artists?
Wikipedia suggests Modern begins in the 1860s; the parent post is absolutely correct that it’s more the patronage rather than the artists or styles that drive classification in this case. Lots of things are disrupting the patronage of art around this time, especially photography, and changing markets for art result in very different kinds of art being produced.
I cannot comment as to whether the CIA is particularly good or bad at anything, but what I will say is that they are particularly effective at guiding domestic policy and operations.
In comparison to whom exactly?
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We can see what our governments are encouraging towards other countries quite easily and openly today. For example in the UK you can see organisations like the British Council (The United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities): https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/news
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!
Patronage, fine art, and propaganda have always been intertwined. It is so fundamental to the subject that it's in the textbooks. This article could be pulled from the course text for intro to modern art.
Hollywood? Most recent one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_(2023_film)
Boy am I glad that we are saying "was" now about that nonsense
Picasso painted Man in a Beret when he was 14 years old. His art became "nonsense" because realism was boring for him.
Lots of programmers get bored of writing simple line-of-business code and find ways to make it more interesting for themselves. It doesn't generally lead to a program that's better for the end user though.
Modernism is ubiquitous. Likely your furniture, computers, cars, and home architecture are heavily modernist unless you explicitly seek out classical stuff.
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).
And the most modernist form of art now is AI generated art. Pure form and aesthetic, but no real meaning or intent, like a face in a mirror, something shaped like human meaning but utterly devoid of it, manufactured like so much else of our reality.
Which, ironically, makes it legitimately art. It's art because it's anti-art.
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Oh boy, any one that thinks their particular art style is "truth" has an ego problem.
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You think Van Gogh and Picasso are nonsense?
Or even Mondrian
Mondrian rules! In my youth I tiled the bathroom in my house in a Mondrian pattern. Mostly white, lowering the cost since white tiles were much cheaper than red yellow and blue.
Yes and no. On one hand, my social class and upbringing almost command that I should find beauty in Van Gogh and Picasso's works. I defer to the masters on matters I do not understand, but it's not where my personal taste and love really lie.
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Absolutely, without exception.
Picasso was a communist and his art was representational. His form of 'modernism' has nothing to do with the kind of actual nonsense that the CIA wanted to push.
I certainly do
The contra to this nonsense was state-controlled and heavily censored - as much as I like Polish school of poster, or overall "tidyness" of communal spaces in post-communist areas, it was (to say it mildly) stifling creativity.
wasn't René Magritte and "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" long before there was a CIA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
Also Picasso was a real commie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso#Political_views - also Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo.
Those were surrealism, cubism and muralism respectively.
The modern art they refer to in the article concerns different, post-1950 kinds...
Still it sounds funny that they would need to employ the CIA in order to finance the Museum of Modern art in... New York, doesn't it?
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 :-) )
This went along with tons of money to left-wing anticommunist/antisoviet writers and scholars (financing a bunch of elite literary journals that no one read, but looked good enough on resumes to get people into the NYRB, Guardian, etc..) If you're on the left, but not a Leninist, don't fall for the flattery of institutions. There are people spending the integrity of naive idealists in order to advance military and strategic goals.
The IDF reads the works of Deleueze and Guattari for inspiration on how to do urban warfare. I always laugh when critical theory influenced folks try to claim they're "anti-authoritarian".
Nope, if anything is a psyop, it's fashionable nonsense. Fashionable nonsense neuters academics who would be revolutionaries and turns them into academic hipsters.
> "Soviet propaganda asserted that the United States was a “culturally barren” capitalist wasteland."
but we invented taco tuesday and family guy
Don't forget Huey Lewis and the News, when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
Yes! On Huey Lewis and the News they seemed a little too willing to cash in on the late seventies/early eighties taste for New Wave, and the album - though it's still a smashing debut - seems a little too stark, too punk.
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And Back to the Future, arguably the greatest movie/trilogy of all time and a distinctly American epic, which also featured several Huey Lewis and the News songs.
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Agreed. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
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And then we empowered companies to sue eachother over the phrase "taco Tuesdays"
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/taco-tuesday-trademark-t...
Was Modern Art a CIA Psy-Op?
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.
There are people out there who look at what you do and think it’s a CIA psy-op. Any subject matter other folks find challenging is like this.
modern art began well before the CIA
Time and Life magazines, etc.
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.
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.
I'm genuinely surprised that the article neglected to mention the intriguing story of Rockefeller Plaza and the artist Diego Rivera.
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
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_at_the_Crossroads
So Andy wharhol shot jfk?
Worse... Duchamp was a shill for Eljer Co.
That's fkd up man...
TLDR: CIA openly admits it controlled art, philosophy, scholarship, and theory to steer leftists, and along with orgs like USAID and NED openly fund such projects today. Who can guess what they do in secret.
yes
No
Back in the days of the John Birch Society people made the same claim except it was the KGB instead.
They could have been unwittingly cooperating with each other.
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Do not be fooled by the article's date. It is another psyop
Ignore this guy's comment, it's obviously a psyop as well.
You're both wrong. I am here for the psyop.
Shit. Strike that from the record. How do you delete comments?
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As someone who blew 500k on an MFA I wish they would bring this back lmfao.
500k?? Did your tuition include cocaine?
Journalism school is $250K and only lasts 2 years. You have to filter out the plebs.
your personal information about to get added to the creepy backrooms of algolia https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
What the hell am I looking at?! I never knew this existed! What else don't i know?
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You took 8+ years to get an MFA?
Please expand on this backstory?
I worked with shams93, their medium was Papier-mâché using 100$ bills.
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probably important to mention the currency in this case.
It's pretty funny this article was published on April 1st
Nothing to see here folks. Just Matrix things.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
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...
It was published by the "Patriotic American Youth" - the youth wing of the precursor of the John Birch Society and affiliated with the (white) Citizens Council Movement, which was formed following Brown v Board of Education.
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...
Yeah, it's fascinating how frequently the paranoid wingnuts of the past turned out to be right. Then you have people like Aldous Huxley and things like the Jaffe memo, painting basically the same picture but from an "inside" perspective.
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It's a summary of an FBI agent's report "Naked Communism". I'm thankful they were motivated to amplify the FBI's findings because the goals are heinous. And if we all agree the goals are heinous then I don't see anything left to contend with. If we can't agree they are heinous then I guess the communist agenda is alive and well.
That the provenance proudly includes "read into the Congressional Record" (Wikipedia also mentions this) is almost all you need to know about this.
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
Was this then a Conspiracy to discredit another Conspiracy?
The predictive power of the Birchers suggests they were onto something.
As much as our government interferes with other countries, makes you wonder how often our country is interfered.
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative who defected to the United States in the early 70s who has some choice words to say on this subject, words which turned out to be more than prophetic. It is worth watching the whole interview, about 1 hour 20 minutes in which he laid out the four stages of ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
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Wow. Check out no: 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engage in atomic war.
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.
Who's teaching them?
32. "Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc."
Was modern art a KGB psy-op covered up by the CIA?
It's frightening to realize that western society has had such powerful totalitarian elements working behind the scenes under the banner of free markets and meritocracy. No wonder everything feels fake.
Occams razor: a much simpler explanation, not disproved by anything in this article, would be that CIA saw that sincere and powerful american and western art was already capturing hearts and minds for effectively, and decided to empower it, since this process aligned with its goals.
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.
More an explanation that requires one to be simple than a simple explanation.
> everyone else's imperialism is bad except mine!
lmao you flagged me for this?
No, I didn't, but it's a silly argument. An option doesn't need need to be good in order to be best, just like a number doesn't need to be positive in order to be the maximum of the set.
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