Comment by reso
3 years ago
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]
[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.
That is an entirely different concept. The sponsorship of art in the country is different than sponsorship of art outside the country. Secondly the sponsorship is done by private individuals instead of a government or military order. CIA cannot be operating in the US and it is a govt institution.
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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
There’s a difference between generalized arts funding, and ideologically directing fund with the intent of fueling movement that align with your ideology. Imagine if the cia had a tech incubator (imagine, lol. Without googling it, I’m pretty sure they do). They could fund anything that seemed likely to succeed, but then it would just be regular business development. If they fund things that align with a specific set of beliefs and goals, that’s another beast entirely
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What was US values back then? If it was fighting USSR then it was a psy-op.
Modern art extends roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s.
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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.
Pop-art and similar is really a reaction to abstract expressionism and as such belongs more to postmodernism. Modernism was more or less over by that time.
Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Malevich, Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse etc were very far from obscure by the time the CIA was even founded.
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.”
Jazz bad, eh? It's funny how they (the CIA?) later had a jazz broadcast at Radio Free Europe, maybe to destabilize communist Eastern Europe? Which eventually, they did. Eveyone in their 20s and their neighbour in EE wanted blue jeans and Coca Cola, the militia (commie police) was going after youths to cut their hair short and used razor blades on their contraband blue jeans. Roughly the same rethoric is now used by Russia against LGBT+ and leaders like Orban and Erdogan are keen to adopt it. Also the far right types.
That's an interesting way to say she drank and doped herself to liver cirrhosis and heart failure.
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.
> Is it really that hard to understand why people don't get the hype around a Jackson Pollock or Voice of Fire?
It kinda is. In the sense that no one is confused if you say you do not Understand the 400th Marvel movie without seeing the previous ones, but art, which largely exists as a conversation with the movements that happened before it, is somehow expected to be understood without context. And mocked if not easily digestible.
It is why artists like Banksy, who in my opinion offer little to nothing, cause a big stir. You do not need to understand what was happening in the art world in the 2000s to get Banksy, a instagram photo does all the work you need.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is now considered a japanese masterpiece, but in reality is heavily influenced by Dutch landscapes and Japan at the time considered it almost foreign art. As if some european now did anime. The conversation and circumstance of that print gives it a lot of nuance, and makes it infinitely more interesting than just the wave and Fuji in the background. Similarly Pollock, as pretentious as he was, lived in an interesting time when even math and physics where shaking their conceptual underpinnings. The time they lived in was a mess, that experience, put to canvas as a rejection of Easel and figurative painting and making the process and important part of the actual finished product is interesting almost in itself, beyond the painting.
Think how many artists now show "behind the scenes" of their work, bringing people closer to the work. From Guillermo del Toro showing his monsters, to actors doing live chats, to artists publishing their doodles and sketches. Pollocks work was an attempt to merge that with the piece itself, make the action of painting it as obvious as possible, compared to art movements like the European French Academy that would knock you points if the brush strokes where visible. Their attempt at perfet painting, make the artist invisible and the subjects "greater than men", all angels and stuff is almost diametrically opposed to Pollock, that wants you to almost see where he tripped, where he was soft and where he just slammed the brush.
Sorry for the rant, just think that it is such a shame, with how interesting art can be that people reject it out of, what looks to me, just not putting the minimum amount of effort to learn about it.
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Ignore the hype and go see it in person. Not Pollock if you feel it's not your thing, go see the Dutch masters or the famous Italian painters if you will. If you don't feel it moves you, then it might not be for you, but if you do, try to imagine someone is feeling the same seeing a Pollock (or Yves Klein, Rothko, etc.).
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> Is it really that hard to understand why people don't get the hype around a Jackson Pollock or Voice of Fire?
I'm going to speculate OP is correct here. Engineers do get persnickety when faced with sufficient ambiguity and messy historical context. Visual arts have both, and fear of the unknown isn't at all a weird default position for humans.
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Have you seen a Jackson Pollock in person? Seen the thick paint on canvas? It's magnificent without context.
Allow me to introduce to you White Painting, The inspiration for 4:33
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.308.A-C/
I'm a painter/illustrator. Lots of art, especially post-abstract expressionism, is definitely a joke.
I got to see copyright discussions here on how AI can reproduce similar art works much faster than a human.
What if the definition of art is applying some paint to a canvas?
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How do you feel about, say, The Fountain?
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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.
You think the human history of art is a scam? Have you considered that you don't know the first thing about art history and would have to go back to cave dwellers' paintings to even have the first idea about what art is?
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I am not scared of tax avoidance techniques.
Don't forget money laundering!