Comment by toss1
3 years ago
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.
It's not an entirely different concept. The comparison he replied to was about both groups funding art to advance their causes and promote their perspectives (pro-Western, pro-God, etc.). That's a perfectly acceptable comparison and it's accurate. The differences you listed are also valid.
States weren't as rigid in the past. Those Tassis family portraits or whatever cannot be meaningfully separated into "state funded" and "privately funded" because the family's wealth was deeply tied to their relationship with various states.
The church's motivation was precisely to spread Christendom to show the sophistication of the church. So it was very much a work of propaganda used to influence people outside just Italy, but across Europe.
This is not unique. The standard of old used to be Kings sponsoring bards. Both the bankers in Florence and the Church were in essence state actors. The banking families basically ran Florence.
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
but everything the government fund aligns with some set of beliefs and goals — we don't fund any schools, they have to have curriculum standards... is public education a psy-op? States don't license any doctor, they have to meet certain criteria... are those state-level psy-ops?
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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.
I'm pretty sure the CIA wasn't funding art before it was founded in 1947, so I have to imagine the US values for the part of modern art history before then aren't what GP was asking about
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.