Not the first time when the Default Country thinks they invented everything. The title is almost comical.
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
> But those making the claim are not talking about that
Which is exactly the problem. If you're going to make an argument that depends on analyzing one very specific thing detached from its surrounding context, you have to actually address that context, and justify why you're ignoring it.
The claim that 1950s pop art was deliberately engineered by a CIA conspiracy for geopolitical purposes can't be sustained without explicitly arguing for why it isn't a natural evolution from the existing trends in art and design that were already prevalent at the time.
> Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe
As someone who is active in the German art scene, the understanding is not that clear-cut. Modern art, as I learned it, is "art in the modern period". So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
The term used more often (at least in Germany) is "contemporary art". Which translates to "everything after WW 2". I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
The 1860s as a starting decade is a popular conventional definition in English, in other languages "modern art" may be defined differently. But you are absolutely right, it makes more sense to call post-WW2 art the contemporary art or just postmodernism, because something that happened long before the birth of the half of the population of the planet isn't really "contemporary".
I think this may be a translation issue, as I would always have understood "modern art" to refer to the movement that began in the 1860s, and (English) Wikipedia appears to back this up. Like others have said, "contemporary art" means art of the current time.
> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).
No, Modern or Modernist art (with a capital m) is a specific period of art history. So yes it doesn’t tend to have museums but there are shows dedicated to Modern art.
Contemporary art always refers to art from the specific period the speaker is living in, ie our present moment.
>Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles.
We drew vastly more art. The kind you describe was just more likely to be preserved as the institutions they were on about and the buildings they resided in persisted.
> So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
Ok, but you are reinforcing parent's point (which I agree with TBH).
According to my understanding on the usage of "contemporary art", this is a "time relative term", meaning it describes usually "what was usually/common around a given time/period"?
I think it a reference to "default city" from the russian internet, when people noticed that people from Moscow never specify the city when talking about topics which would normally require knowledge of which city are they residents of
Eventually it evolved, sometimes people say "hey, I'm from DC" or "hey, I live in DC2" (that means the second largest city, Saint-Petersburg)
I think you might be reacting to the title only. The claim in the article is better phrased as “the Modern art was psy-op-ed by the US govt, especially through CIA”. They didn’t invent it, they may not even liked it personally. The very same artists making these paintings were not too far from being left leaning and sympathizing with regimes and ideas US government fought against. Nevertheless, it was still worth it, the sponsorship was seen as a counter to the Soviet art and culture. If anything a least as a “look you can even create these crazy paint splatters in a free society and nobody sends you to gulag” kind of angle.
Jain. If you leave only the facts, it becomes a bit boring, because everyone did that and continues doing so via various institutions. But the article pitches with the title and first paragraph a different story. And I doubt that e.g. Picasso was aware of the battle for his mind.
Reduction of modern art to abstract expressionism is the same as reduction of cinema to MCU. Acceptable for a talk over couple beers, disqualifying factor for pretend-to-be intellectuals, mainly because it is cherry-picking based on the scale of a scandal rather than genuine interest in the history of art.
'modern' is such an omnibus of a term. I was recently looking at Jasper John's American Flag and it hit me that the stars are weird---because it is from 1955 so before Hawaii and Alaska, and so it has 48 stars in even rows. It was amusing to realize that this epitomy of modern art is quite ancient :)
'Mid 20th century' is when the explosion of mass media happened, and these concepts were globalized.
It's worth studying for sure, and frankly, it seems the CIA came to a reasonable conclusion. The backed art for literally the right reasons. Good on them.
Both Hitler and Stalin only respected/allowed representational art. They both hated abstract art. Any promotion of non-representational art was in effect a rejection of Stalin (and Mao and Kim).
Socialist Realism was the name for the representational art promoted by Stalin, Mao & Kim. It was always a propaganda piece.
Literally the best possible kind of psy-op. Same with translating Sesame Street and distributing it to 100s of countries. Same with countries like Thailand exporting Thai food. It's a psy op based on what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world, our country would grow in prestige and soft power. And these strategies are usually pretty effective, not to mention usually net-positive for all sides ... compared with so many other horibble harms US and other countries foreign offices have done around the world out of self interest.
All art requires growth and change. Artists can't go on doing the same things forever. Will they take a turn into some dead end...sure. Maybe even for centuries. But remaining static is certain death.
dude take one single art history class... (well, maybe 2 since the first one is going to give you the venus of willendorf and ionic/doric columns...) this is nonsense.
The only reason the CIA did it in secret is that congress _hated_ modern art and killed State Department projects supporting it. The soviets and every other government also promoted their own artists abroad extensively. Not everything the CIA did was a psy-op, sometimes it was a convenient way for the executive branch to do something that congress didn't want to pay for.
I wish those actions made the folks doing that "better" instead of implicating beautiful parts of my childhood in their vicious attempts to keep the entire world under their thumb...
The obvious problem is that when the same group is committing vicious crimes and horrors, it's very hard to look at about anything they do and be like... well, at least folks were getting laid during Midnight Climax.
"Oh, hey, that's cute: the vicious monsters who torture people to death in a global network of black sites are manipulating us again by exporting pleasant videos of puppets teaching children".
what do mean with the example of thailand and thai food, and why is that a psy-op?
Every country tries to subsidize and dump excess production of stuff they produce
> what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world
Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.
The CIA didn’t invent the camera which was really the trigger for the arrival of modern art and the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world.
At the same time though, if you go somewhere like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, upon leaving that fantastic building it does occur to you that the whole thing is an outpost for American artistic culture, or if you want to frame it another way, American cultural imperialism because every artwork in there (pretty much, there’s a yayoi kusama mirror box for the instagrammers) is American and something of an modernist and contemporary assault against every tradition of European art, including Picasso. So to frame the whole of American artistic culture as the CIA’s doing is like the tail wagging the dog of a broader phenomenon – rich Americans in general funded this movement into existence and the CIA likely joined in.
The bankers could make the art themselves then, if that were the case. Fine art still needs to be made by artists. Conceptual art can be made by anyone with a concept.
"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
A lot of people are confused by the term "modern art" in this.
This isn't meant to be about the idea of modern art in general, not about modernist art, or a "history of art" compatible conception of the term.
So whether "modern art started with the invention of the film camera" and other such claims about the late 19th here is irrelevant.
In the context of TFA and the CIA-related discussion, "modern art" refers mainly to abstract expressionism and to a lesser degree pop art and conceptual art, in US and Western Europe.
That was the scene and its sub-scenes which dominated the Western galleries and art world in the post "cold" war period, and for layman uses (and even for several critical treatments), it was synonymous with modern art, in the sense of the fine arts, in general. Hence the use of the term.
That's the way the term "modern art" is used in this.
Old news. Modern art is Antiart made to destroy European culture and replace it for the global debauchery of Americana. Harmful to the soul, void of talent, turning western civilization from master painters to banana + duct tape.
EDIT: Saachi works similar to the way boy and girl bands are created. They are not artists, but underpaid unknowns whose works are packaged, productized, propped up, marketed and sold like Kpop idols. It’s a machine.
Most of greatest works of modern art are European. The term “modern art” is in reference to an era that we are no longer in.
You have a strong opinion. I would highly implore you to learn more about art history and why art is the way it is today. You’ll learn why banana and duct tape is why it is.
What makes an art work museum worthy? It’s very rewarding to have that insight.
I feel like a good number of people have gotten fatigue from the share of mindspace given to art that is deemed valuable due to some art history, that you maybe even can only get if you have knowledge of art history or read the plague attributing the "clever" meaning.
Not everyone gives about the class signaling that brings or the like or the insight that makes one say 'oooh i get it now' or how avant garde in a slightly new way the next pollock is.
I think it's fitting how someone else compared it to the declinging returns of bitcoin mining.
After Duchamp's Fountain, Cattelan's Comedian, Warhol's campbell cans,...what share still give a shit about definitional art or other similarly iterated on styles? Maybe you can make a piece about it.
Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were Europeans, and Europe is where art speculation and the "Art Market" was born, and where Art History became equated with Art Market History. Americans showed up with a 20 year lag and kept lagging, with e.g. Pollock imitating Picasso in the 1940s. By then, globally-viral-Picasso was selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of inflation adjusted dollars.
I wouldn't use the nomer americana which is a grouping of styles itself becoming less comon.
Secondly I wouldn't ascribe intentionality to all if it.
That's what made it so dangerous and imo destructive. It self-propagates.
I saw people in the arts in turn instilling the idea that all these modern greats in some slightly different way pushed the boundaries with their slightly new thing and for that we should remember their name.
To be avant garde was a quality in and of itself. The only quality.
And it happened to diminish the need for certain skills.
Understanding the origins, ideas, etc happened to become a form of social signaling. (this kind of art thoughtleader is typically not ascribed to a poor person detached from artistic cricles after all)
Barely a soul seemed to think there was something to the kind of expressive qualities we sought for thousands of years might have intrinsic value that was not derived from further abstracting things down or meaning that had to be taped on to be understood,, etc.
And so I saw so many people chasing their ego to either be different in ironically the same ways or mostly to just roll with the style du jour all without any kind of self reflection.
Also funilly enough I remember seeing an architect or 2 baffled that people liked certain classical styles because they were thought how these "incorrectly" took from previous even older styles. As if nobody could deconstruct their cubic creations in the same way.
I would mostly agree with you in that legitimate movements are very frequently ideologically captured and utilized by agencies. Art is no exception. The individual artist, like the individual musician, or disney princess going bad, is ill equipped against the forces at play that use these expressions of culture either for the transition of the republic towards an empire, its hegemony or its ultimate decline. When an agency becomes the patron of the arts, there is a cultural objective and it is the strength of culture, not might, that sustains a civilization. Religion is the state recognized cult, and culture flows from it.
The "banana taped to a wall" tendency in art began in Europe, with Dadaism. But I think you're half right, in that it was a clear reaction to the destruction of Europe (by itself, in the first World War).
Modern art is modern art because by the early 20th century, it was hard to do anything original in something resembling a traditional style.
It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music.
Arnold Schoenberg wasn't a psyop. If anything it is a comment on the lack of modern cultural sophistication and the way people relate to the world in terms of sensationalist narrative for click optimization.
Agree. I felt like I wasn't interested in art. I just didn't like it. Turns out, it's not a "me" problem, it's an "art" problem. Once I got involved in the furry community I discovered how beautiful art can be. My whole house is full of furry artworks, and I'm commissioning more. Those artists create things that are fun, novel, original. As opposed to "abstract New York no. 41715".
But the deeper problem is that an average consumer simply doesn't care about quality. Look at how most people listen to the music - random radio with same 10 pop songs over and over again with ads in-between, while being stuck in traffic. They're not experiencing music, they just want something to fill the void and that's it.
Out of curiosity, can you link to a publicly available furry work to help someone curious get into it? And help to know what to look for to appreciate it.
I am starting to be under the impression that movements are steered by leaders but formed only when the underlying conditions are present. No single element can make the movement.
I am reluctant to believe stories like "The CIA created modern art", as it is just a single part, although a very influential part, of the movement.
I say this as somebody who is very cautious about believing anything and am quick to call things (probably incorrectly) propaganda or disseminated by paid actors.
My understanding is that the CIA influenced the rise of modern art over Soviet realism, eg, by hosting shows and bidding up prices.
That is “created” in the sense that a movement would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage, but not “created” as in invented absent an underlying cohort of sincere artists.
If you believe the CIA was an important and necessary part of the movement, you seem to agree they created.1 modern art, even if they co-opted rather than created.2 the style.
I assume by "orchestrated" you mean intended by the people involved in making them happen. Humans act in the world. Some people have power and influence that they bring to bear on their activities and desired outcomes. It's true.
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
A great book on this is 'Active Measures'. Most things have an organic start, which are then amplified / co-opted by various actors.
The concept of Nuclear Winter first came up in the USA, then the Russians caught wind of it and claimed they had independently reached the same conclusions. This helped them turn public opinion against the deployment of more missile bases in Europe... conveniently after they had already deployed theirs.
When I grew up in Soviet Union we heard "political" jokes and also heard that they were written by CIA. It was not generally believed to be true. Even mocked later, like "You think Soviets could not come up with jokes on their own?"
But now I started to think this could be true to certain extent. There were collections of such jokes printed abroad and smuggled into USSR. This does not mean they were printed by CIA, of course. But there is also tone of those jokes.
They were not the kind of jokes that point out something like low quality of goods or services (Reagan retold a few of these; such jokes were widespread and absolutely legal, there were numerous official satirical magazines that had them in spades). These was, for example, a series of jokes about a certain Civil war figure. There was a movie about him ("Chapaev", last name) that was immensely popular in USSR. In the series of jokes he and his comrades appeared as the filthiest and stupidiest scoundrels. There also was a serie of jokes about "War and Peace" figures (Rostova, Bolkonsky, etc.), with exactly same approach.
What started that process was a rather dull and artificial joke that turned out to mock an end scene of some war movie. I somehow missed that movie in my youth, but I knew the title of it, the movie and the book it was based on were well known. But once I saw it I clearly saw that the joke was meant to mock the movie; there is no other explanation.
Thing is, the scene should not be mocked. William James wrote that a characteristic quality of a religious experience was a feeling of seriousness; "not all is vanity". This feeling was very alive in USSR, even though it was a formally atheist country. We clearly understood that as kids. Not because you will be punished, mind you, but because this will harm you.
With that understanding I reevaluated the other jokes and indeed the intent was same. I also remembered certain songs that also appeared about that time; they were called "emigrant songs" and, apparently, they were recorded in Russian neigbourhoods of New York. They were in fantastically bad taste; yet they were everywhere.
Bad taste and bad jokes don't need CIA; but now I think CIA indeed played a part by giving all that a much bugger scale that might have happened organically.
Oh man, I just listened to an episode of Decoder Ring about why making classical realist sculptures in the US is a challenge. It gives some interesting context about the rejection of realism in the post-war West:
Thanks so much for sharing this! I went looking for what I’d call modern “masterwork” statues a year or so ago and had come to this exact same conclusion. Glad that other people are noticing!
What you observe, elevate, worship is the same thing.
The modern culture want you to worship individuality, expression, pleasure, etc.
The result is the destruction of society, of the building blocks, what remain is atomic individuals and a central power structure that always control more and centralise.
Our roots was to worship Christ (self sacrifice for love and truth) with that sweept aside, we worship pleasure, ourselves, the intellect, etc. We are much easier to control than stuborn truth believer that are ready to die for it.
I feel like absolutely everything is a PsyOp. I mean look at how many big cities there are around the world, how many millions of people working in office buildings; every single day; thinking, crafting emails, organizing events, coordinating, writing up marketing, creating PowerPoint slides, filling out Excel sheets, writing up reports, writing up project briefs... Millions of brains and machines manipulating information.
I would be surprised if there's anything which is of any interest to any meaningful group of humans which is not a PsyOp.
I was hoping they would go into how modern printing made lithography a household method. Then maybe go about protecting intellectual property from convincing replica's. They didn't go into that. Not even a passing reference into Tenet.
If you watch YouTube interviews/documentaries about the CIA, one of the things that all of them point out is the disguise division, which makes some fascinating facemasks and other disguises.
Wait til you find out what the GIA[1] did with other forms of cultural expression and education - like motion pictures, music, television, and academia
[1]: Global Intelligence Agency - because we know that they have deep reach into every nation at this point and are only accountable to themselves.
Before yielding to concern about CIA influence in modern art, consider what they would have been up against. Situationism and the post-surrealist projects were wildly successful tactics to demoralize western culture and separate it from a sense of purpose and identity. Do you think Punk was entirely organic, or did it get nudges and windfalls from interested parties?
I was involved in the industrial/alternative club scenes in the 90's and the degrees of separation of those bands from what we would call obvious influence operations today are few. If someone were to design a cost effective machine for cultivating troubled loners into a recruitment pipeline for a sabotage and activism capacity, a few thousand dollars here and there to promote and exalt some drug addicts making angry subversive noise would be the way to do it.
Night life and its various vices and perversions was such a fantastically successful anti-capitalist operation that if you ask a modern CIA agent what flag sits on their boss' desk today, they will tell you there is more than one.
In the words of John Lydon, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
True Soft Power - Hollywood, and associated media industry, which happens to be the platform through which "Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop", etc. reach people.
With the Internet and some competing heavy-weights, it may no longer be an US soft superpower it was before, but it still retains its important quality: it's ubiquitous, ever-present, and so enormous it's hard to notice - much like fish don't think much about the water they swim in.
I remember from one of my art history courses that it was more a rejection of Hitler & Stalin. Those 2 loved representational art so much that "the art world" took decades before representational art was acceptable.
I don’t know if this is a reaction to AI or something, but recently I’ve only been interested in classical/realism art. I just can’t do abstract cubes anymore. The default wallpaper of windows 11 is a perfect example - I hate it. Give me a wallpaper of some painting from the Renaissance.
Fun fact - the default Windows 10 wallpaper was actually shot on a real camera in physical space[0], making it one of the exceptions. It's disappointing that they went back to 3D renders in 11, but it was probably done so they could make their light and dark mode versions match exactly.
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
That is an interesting thought. To me I think I think my brain is being re wired to appreciate effort. Not saying there isn’t modern art that doesn’t take effort. But paintings from the masters is a good place to start.
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
Pretty embarrassing that this is the title of a post on JSTOR.
Modern art started in the late 1800s, long before the CIA or its predecessor existed. Using this term to describe contemporary art, or abstract art more generally, is an (anti?) shibboleth that indicates you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I realize the article is about mid century artists, but I’m certain it’s being upvoted here because people think the title is referring to contemporary, 21st century art.
If you meant something more specific, like abstract expressionism, then again, it’s mostly just a continuation of previous trends. Sure, the government sponsored some things, but it’s not as if postwar American artists invented the entire concept of modern art (which is what the article seems to be implying.)
And if you meant very abstract / performance contemporary art, the kind of thing uninformed people like to describe as modern art, again, most of that got started in the 60s (with antecedents in the 10s, 20s, etc.) and was mostly by people the CIA thought were subversives.
Did you actually read the article? It lays out a pretty compelling case that the CIA established funding sources and magazines to popularize American modern art and make it a worldwide phenomenon / a cultural export to have Americans be taken seriously as taste makers.
Yes, I did and as I said, the title is pretty out of line with the actual article. Which itself has almost zero mention of modern art / 1930s-40-50s art outside of the American context.
Modern art was not a CIA psy op. Modern art precedes the CIA by a century. Mid-century American art was popularized in part by American government organizations. These are entirely different claims.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
The resistance to abstraction in the early 1900s came from a failed art student named Adolf Hitler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_exhibition). It was amplified by post-war Soviet propaganda and that is what the CIA was poking at during late modernism. Hitler and the Soviets wanted social realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism) to offer idealized citizens, not individual expression or any kind of doubt really. They are not the only ones. Post-George Floyd exhibitions pivoted heavily to representation and social realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Sherald). That is still happening. The latest is none other than Trump and Pete Hegseth, who post classic German propaganda style AI images of young white people in working class contexts.
Abstract Expressionism was the pinnacle of modern art and was much more than a style or aesthetic. It was a total embrace of pure individuality. That's why it has been resisted by every social movement since. It is the essence of non-conformity. Political groups require conformity.
Sounds like it was more about spreading American culture as part of the Cold War. This feels a lot more benign compared to Modernist architecture which seems to have fascist tendencies what with Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson being literal Nazi sympathizers.
The art itself is not a psyop and it can't be because it's too abstract to send a political message. The movement around it was supported in a CIA psyop to present America as the place where artists are free to do what they want, at a time when the Soviet Union enforced socialist realism as the only official art style and if you did something different you couldn't get state funding. It was a good old PR move.
A lot of people misunderstand this and think it's some conspiracy to demoralize society and "erase Western culture". If that was true there would be witch hunts against traditional art and calls to destroy it.
When you look at the real abstract artists they used language about freedom to make art outside its traditional constraints and encouraged others to try it out, but I don't think any large group of them ever wanted to fully replace and condemn the old ways. Some definitely switched their style to fit in but as far as I know it was all voluntary.
yet another case of an editor writing a clickbait headline for a much more nuanced article about a very specific and interesting topic
it both makes sense and seems very obvious that the CIA utilized an artistic movement as both a tool of internal domestic propaganda (excluding Soviet art which was incredible for its time due to actually being publicly funded) and to push soft power overseas by dangling inclusion in supposedly prestigious cultural institutions (ie mostly playthings of the rich, populated with the owned art of the rich with the blessing of the government which increased the cultural prestige and thus later sale value of the art)
a more honest title might be 'Is the way we perceive modern art influenced by Cold War American propaganda'? but I suppose that wouldn't have Gen Z and Alpha clicking through and learning how culturally bankrupt things are in the West, and how pervasive and invisibilized so much of our domestic propaganda is
another example of this might be the way nonviolence as a protest strategy just happened to be greatly encouraged by the rich and CIA-connected [0] [1]
The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by someone else.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
I wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.
Betteridge’s law prevails. A fun read, but not as fun as the title suggests.
tl;dr Modern art existed before the CIA and even CIA predecessors did not originate it, but they did push it abroad to show that America is great because we put up with modern art made by socialists depite most americans disliking both the art and the artists
Exactly, it is a weird title. Modern art is as much of a "psy-op" as:
- grocery stores
- NASA
- rock music
- psychedelics and hippies
- a strong middle class
- affordable vehicles and the highway system
- Hollywood movies
- Books
and just about anything. Cultural "warfare" is a different ballgame. K-Pop and K-dramas are "cultural warfare" from Korea. J-pop and anime from Japan (here's a clickbait title: Was Studio Ghibli a Japanese Psy-Op?). So is Thai Food and avocados. Anything that makes the country look good or even become more well known outside its borders can be considered a "psy-op". But not in the sense that any reasonable person would interpret the term...
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
The interesting thing to me is, despite it being hard to imagine today, back then this was actually a strange thing, and did actually serve as a demonstration of American freedom of expression.
Hard to imagine today because this kind of weird art comes from just about everywhere with a few exceptions now.
Interesting to read about how it actually was the work of a few elite institutions that made this happen. Agreed the CIA angle is a bit weak, to me it's more a story about the Rockefellers and their compatriots who funded this stuff.
But I mean is this something that is supposed to be shocking or revelaing? All countries want to promote their culture so they win the soft war and influence. You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us? Look up what the south korean gov planned and how it worked out overall.
It is interesting they were taunting the Soviets by saying "look our artists are so free even we dont know wtf they are making but we support them!" rather than "look how amazing modern art is" lol
Right wing nutjobs who think the most important thing in the world is what exists between your legs. A few years ago there were news stories about a family that decided to raise their child "gender free" and that they would not announce the gender of the child to the world. The outrage that story produced was astonishing. People who would never in their entire life meet that kid were having fits because knowing what genitals that kid had was more important than anything else in their life.
Also the author of Harry Potter stories is rabidly transphobic. She's spending millions of dollars on propaganda and hate groups. It is so bad that none of the actors who played in the HP movies want anything to do with her. She's so angry at that that she's financing remakes of the movies with politically reliable/subservient staff & actors.
“educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”
Funny how times have changed and more or less everyone on every side is fighting for the strength and survival of their own groupthink and little more.
Eventually, people realize they will never agree and therefore don't have to fight.
They realize the majority of their beliefs already existed before they were born and will continue on after they're dead. They have nothing to add to the conversation while they are too busy fighting. They turn their focus to developing their ideas peacefully and let their subcultures flourish once again.
This isn't the first cycle and won't be the last. The last major cycle was in the 20th century due to broadcast media. I think people sometimes forget how relatively young the internet is.
"Live and let live" is in fundamental tension with "protect the weak." ALL aggressive ideologies act as heroes protecting others from oppression. There is a barely expressible thing that allows people to live in peace with those they disagree with. It is a personality trait, an aesthetic, a mood associated with the best of the Enlightenment but never described by it. Perhaps people need relative silence, a few good books, physical labor, hand-made goods, and slow travel to attain it. I often wonder at how boldly people think they can reduce the enormous, holistic experience of being of a particular time and place and call the effect simply "reason".
Colleges generally cleave between the humanities and science. The humanities, one will discover, often have a highly left/liberal lean. If you happen not to have that lean, you will probably find yourself over in the sciences somewhere.
Not the first time when the Default Country thinks they invented everything. The title is almost comical.
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
Sure. But those making the claim are not talking about that.
They're talking about the post 50s abstract expressionism and pop art movements.
Just because it says "modern art" doesn't mean it refers to any and all modern art, much less 19th century art or say cubism or dada.
> But those making the claim are not talking about that
Which is exactly the problem. If you're going to make an argument that depends on analyzing one very specific thing detached from its surrounding context, you have to actually address that context, and justify why you're ignoring it.
The claim that 1950s pop art was deliberately engineered by a CIA conspiracy for geopolitical purposes can't be sustained without explicitly arguing for why it isn't a natural evolution from the existing trends in art and design that were already prevalent at the time.
> Just because it says "modern art" ...
I think we can all agree that naming anything "modern" or "new" or "nu" (for new) is simply deeply dumbfucktarded.
GP talks about the 1860s: I'm sorry but nothing about the 1860s is "modern" in 2026. Just as nothing from 2026 shall be "modern" in 2160.
It's nearly as if at least one of the two hardest problems in computer science, naming things, applied to other things too.
The art of arbitrarily redefining existing terms will never die out.
21 replies →
Overall a great point, but I have a nit-pick:
> Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe
As someone who is active in the German art scene, the understanding is not that clear-cut. Modern art, as I learned it, is "art in the modern period". So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
The term used more often (at least in Germany) is "contemporary art". Which translates to "everything after WW 2". I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
The 1860s as a starting decade is a popular conventional definition in English, in other languages "modern art" may be defined differently. But you are absolutely right, it makes more sense to call post-WW2 art the contemporary art or just postmodernism, because something that happened long before the birth of the half of the population of the planet isn't really "contemporary".
I think this may be a translation issue, as I would always have understood "modern art" to refer to the movement that began in the 1860s, and (English) Wikipedia appears to back this up. Like others have said, "contemporary art" means art of the current time.
> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).
No, Modern or Modernist art (with a capital m) is a specific period of art history. So yes it doesn’t tend to have museums but there are shows dedicated to Modern art.
Contemporary art always refers to art from the specific period the speaker is living in, ie our present moment.
>Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles.
We drew vastly more art. The kind you describe was just more likely to be preserved as the institutions they were on about and the buildings they resided in persisted.
3 replies →
> So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
Ok, but you are reinforcing parent's point (which I agree with TBH).
1 reply →
What kind of art do you think the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), houses?
2 replies →
- contemporary art -
Now I have to nitpick, too too :-)
According to my understanding on the usage of "contemporary art", this is a "time relative term", meaning it describes usually "what was usually/common around a given time/period"?
"the Default Country" is a good one. I'll have to start using that.
I think it a reference to "default city" from the russian internet, when people noticed that people from Moscow never specify the city when talking about topics which would normally require knowledge of which city are they residents of
Eventually it evolved, sometimes people say "hey, I'm from DC" or "hey, I live in DC2" (that means the second largest city, Saint-Petersburg)
1 reply →
Especially from someone whose "modern art" means mid-19th centuary European art under an article that starts with "In the mid-twentieth century".
For fun, ask a citizen of the Default Country where cars were invented ...
1 reply →
I think you might be reacting to the title only. The claim in the article is better phrased as “the Modern art was psy-op-ed by the US govt, especially through CIA”. They didn’t invent it, they may not even liked it personally. The very same artists making these paintings were not too far from being left leaning and sympathizing with regimes and ideas US government fought against. Nevertheless, it was still worth it, the sponsorship was seen as a counter to the Soviet art and culture. If anything a least as a “look you can even create these crazy paint splatters in a free society and nobody sends you to gulag” kind of angle.
Jain. If you leave only the facts, it becomes a bit boring, because everyone did that and continues doing so via various institutions. But the article pitches with the title and first paragraph a different story. And I doubt that e.g. Picasso was aware of the battle for his mind.
By "modern art" they mean things like abstract expressionism.
Reduction of modern art to abstract expressionism is the same as reduction of cinema to MCU. Acceptable for a talk over couple beers, disqualifying factor for pretend-to-be intellectuals, mainly because it is cherry-picking based on the scale of a scandal rather than genuine interest in the history of art.
4 replies →
That is not Modern art but an offshoot of it, like postmodern and pop art.
Which is even more absurd
7 replies →
'modern' is such an omnibus of a term. I was recently looking at Jasper John's American Flag and it hit me that the stars are weird---because it is from 1955 so before Hawaii and Alaska, and so it has 48 stars in even rows. It was amusing to realize that this epitomy of modern art is quite ancient :)
Let's hear what non-default country invented pop-art in the 50s.
The one with the young Queen, which also invented English language…
And Xerox invented the GUI but who cares?
'Mid 20th century' is when the explosion of mass media happened, and these concepts were globalized.
It's worth studying for sure, and frankly, it seems the CIA came to a reasonable conclusion. The backed art for literally the right reasons. Good on them.
You clearly didn't even click through to the article, and neither did most of the people arguing with you.
Both Hitler and Stalin only respected/allowed representational art. They both hated abstract art. Any promotion of non-representational art was in effect a rejection of Stalin (and Mao and Kim).
Socialist Realism was the name for the representational art promoted by Stalin, Mao & Kim. It was always a propaganda piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art
If there was anything that Default Country did better than Commieland, the CIA would promote it. Art? Sure. Why not, some people like that stuff.
Thanks for the new term.
Literally the best possible kind of psy-op. Same with translating Sesame Street and distributing it to 100s of countries. Same with countries like Thailand exporting Thai food. It's a psy op based on what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world, our country would grow in prestige and soft power. And these strategies are usually pretty effective, not to mention usually net-positive for all sides ... compared with so many other horibble harms US and other countries foreign offices have done around the world out of self interest.
Modern art sucks, and displaced art that is beautiful. Huge net loss for humanity.
"… displaced art that is beautiful."
Photography did that.
I didn't used to like pop-art, op-art, etc. I do now.
I suspect most things new take a while to sink in.
1 reply →
All art requires growth and change. Artists can't go on doing the same things forever. Will they take a turn into some dead end...sure. Maybe even for centuries. But remaining static is certain death.
Idk I think it's kind of neat
2 replies →
dude take one single art history class... (well, maybe 2 since the first one is going to give you the venus of willendorf and ionic/doric columns...) this is nonsense.
1 reply →
The only reason the CIA did it in secret is that congress _hated_ modern art and killed State Department projects supporting it. The soviets and every other government also promoted their own artists abroad extensively. Not everything the CIA did was a psy-op, sometimes it was a convenient way for the executive branch to do something that congress didn't want to pay for.
I wish those actions made the folks doing that "better" instead of implicating beautiful parts of my childhood in their vicious attempts to keep the entire world under their thumb...
The obvious problem is that when the same group is committing vicious crimes and horrors, it's very hard to look at about anything they do and be like... well, at least folks were getting laid during Midnight Climax.
"Oh, hey, that's cute: the vicious monsters who torture people to death in a global network of black sites are manipulating us again by exporting pleasant videos of puppets teaching children".
what do mean with the example of thailand and thai food, and why is that a psy-op? Every country tries to subsidize and dump excess production of stuff they produce
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-t...
2 replies →
They invented what is called "Thai food" for the export market, to bring in tourists.
> what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world
Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.
The CIA didn’t invent the camera which was really the trigger for the arrival of modern art and the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world.
At the same time though, if you go somewhere like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, upon leaving that fantastic building it does occur to you that the whole thing is an outpost for American artistic culture, or if you want to frame it another way, American cultural imperialism because every artwork in there (pretty much, there’s a yayoi kusama mirror box for the instagrammers) is American and something of an modernist and contemporary assault against every tradition of European art, including Picasso. So to frame the whole of American artistic culture as the CIA’s doing is like the tail wagging the dog of a broader phenomenon – rich Americans in general funded this movement into existence and the CIA likely joined in.
Art became an investment and artistic properties ceased to matter.
The bankers could make the art themselves then, if that were the case. Fine art still needs to be made by artists. Conceptual art can be made by anyone with a concept.
1 reply →
"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
I didn’t say complete abandonment. You’re imagining what I’m imagining.
A lot of people are confused by the term "modern art" in this.
This isn't meant to be about the idea of modern art in general, not about modernist art, or a "history of art" compatible conception of the term.
So whether "modern art started with the invention of the film camera" and other such claims about the late 19th here is irrelevant.
In the context of TFA and the CIA-related discussion, "modern art" refers mainly to abstract expressionism and to a lesser degree pop art and conceptual art, in US and Western Europe.
That was the scene and its sub-scenes which dominated the Western galleries and art world in the post "cold" war period, and for layman uses (and even for several critical treatments), it was synonymous with modern art, in the sense of the fine arts, in general. Hence the use of the term.
That's the way the term "modern art" is used in this.
[flagged]
It's precisely the kind of forum where answers adding context are appreciated. Might take more than a barely month-old account to see it though.
Old news. Modern art is Antiart made to destroy European culture and replace it for the global debauchery of Americana. Harmful to the soul, void of talent, turning western civilization from master painters to banana + duct tape.
EDIT: Saachi works similar to the way boy and girl bands are created. They are not artists, but underpaid unknowns whose works are packaged, productized, propped up, marketed and sold like Kpop idols. It’s a machine.
Most of greatest works of modern art are European. The term “modern art” is in reference to an era that we are no longer in.
You have a strong opinion. I would highly implore you to learn more about art history and why art is the way it is today. You’ll learn why banana and duct tape is why it is.
What makes an art work museum worthy? It’s very rewarding to have that insight.
I feel like a good number of people have gotten fatigue from the share of mindspace given to art that is deemed valuable due to some art history, that you maybe even can only get if you have knowledge of art history or read the plague attributing the "clever" meaning.
Not everyone gives about the class signaling that brings or the like or the insight that makes one say 'oooh i get it now' or how avant garde in a slightly new way the next pollock is. I think it's fitting how someone else compared it to the declinging returns of bitcoin mining. After Duchamp's Fountain, Cattelan's Comedian, Warhol's campbell cans,...what share still give a shit about definitional art or other similarly iterated on styles? Maybe you can make a piece about it.
>Most of greatest works of modern art are European
Convincing post-war europe that they are outside the influence of the US was also a great psyop
Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were Europeans, and Europe is where art speculation and the "Art Market" was born, and where Art History became equated with Art Market History. Americans showed up with a 20 year lag and kept lagging, with e.g. Pollock imitating Picasso in the 1940s. By then, globally-viral-Picasso was selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of inflation adjusted dollars.
Maybe it's just semantics but:
I wouldn't use the nomer americana which is a grouping of styles itself becoming less comon.
Secondly I wouldn't ascribe intentionality to all if it. That's what made it so dangerous and imo destructive. It self-propagates. I saw people in the arts in turn instilling the idea that all these modern greats in some slightly different way pushed the boundaries with their slightly new thing and for that we should remember their name. To be avant garde was a quality in and of itself. The only quality. And it happened to diminish the need for certain skills. Understanding the origins, ideas, etc happened to become a form of social signaling. (this kind of art thoughtleader is typically not ascribed to a poor person detached from artistic cricles after all)
Barely a soul seemed to think there was something to the kind of expressive qualities we sought for thousands of years might have intrinsic value that was not derived from further abstracting things down or meaning that had to be taped on to be understood,, etc.
And so I saw so many people chasing their ego to either be different in ironically the same ways or mostly to just roll with the style du jour all without any kind of self reflection.
Also funilly enough I remember seeing an architect or 2 baffled that people liked certain classical styles because they were thought how these "incorrectly" took from previous even older styles. As if nobody could deconstruct their cubic creations in the same way.
>It self-propagates
Part of the design spec of the psyop, perhaps
I would mostly agree with you in that legitimate movements are very frequently ideologically captured and utilized by agencies. Art is no exception. The individual artist, like the individual musician, or disney princess going bad, is ill equipped against the forces at play that use these expressions of culture either for the transition of the republic towards an empire, its hegemony or its ultimate decline. When an agency becomes the patron of the arts, there is a cultural objective and it is the strength of culture, not might, that sustains a civilization. Religion is the state recognized cult, and culture flows from it.
Yours is a good take but the duct taping of the banana was done by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
The "banana taped to a wall" tendency in art began in Europe, with Dadaism. But I think you're half right, in that it was a clear reaction to the destruction of Europe (by itself, in the first World War).
A banana taped to the wall is a deeper and more profound art commentary than yours.
This is nonsense.
Modern art is modern art because by the early 20th century, it was hard to do anything original in something resembling a traditional style.
It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music.
Arnold Schoenberg wasn't a psyop. If anything it is a comment on the lack of modern cultural sophistication and the way people relate to the world in terms of sensationalist narrative for click optimization.
> It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music
I don't see ANY dearth of originality in American 12-tone music during the cold war. What are you meaning by this?
you're agreeing, just harping on slight different (and all valid) uses of the words.
Agree. I felt like I wasn't interested in art. I just didn't like it. Turns out, it's not a "me" problem, it's an "art" problem. Once I got involved in the furry community I discovered how beautiful art can be. My whole house is full of furry artworks, and I'm commissioning more. Those artists create things that are fun, novel, original. As opposed to "abstract New York no. 41715".
But the deeper problem is that an average consumer simply doesn't care about quality. Look at how most people listen to the music - random radio with same 10 pop songs over and over again with ads in-between, while being stuck in traffic. They're not experiencing music, they just want something to fill the void and that's it.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I would prefer "abstract New York no. 41715" to anything remotely connected to furries.
And that's fine, people have different tastes, there's nothing wrong with it.
Out of curiosity, can you link to a publicly available furry work to help someone curious get into it? And help to know what to look for to appreciate it.
1 reply →
Far more things/movements are orchestrated than are organic. This is to me one of the most surprising things I have learned as I got older.
I am starting to be under the impression that movements are steered by leaders but formed only when the underlying conditions are present. No single element can make the movement.
I am reluctant to believe stories like "The CIA created modern art", as it is just a single part, although a very influential part, of the movement.
I say this as somebody who is very cautious about believing anything and am quick to call things (probably incorrectly) propaganda or disseminated by paid actors.
Is the claim “created”?
My understanding is that the CIA influenced the rise of modern art over Soviet realism, eg, by hosting shows and bidding up prices.
That is “created” in the sense that a movement would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage, but not “created” as in invented absent an underlying cohort of sincere artists.
If you believe the CIA was an important and necessary part of the movement, you seem to agree they created.1 modern art, even if they co-opted rather than created.2 the style.
1 reply →
I assume by "orchestrated" you mean intended by the people involved in making them happen. Humans act in the world. Some people have power and influence that they bring to bear on their activities and desired outcomes. It's true.
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
I meant orchestrated in a subversive way
A great book on this is 'Active Measures'. Most things have an organic start, which are then amplified / co-opted by various actors.
The concept of Nuclear Winter first came up in the USA, then the Russians caught wind of it and claimed they had independently reached the same conclusions. This helped them turn public opinion against the deployment of more missile bases in Europe... conveniently after they had already deployed theirs.
I think the first time that was brought to my attention was one of our host's essays: The Submarine.
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
When I grew up in Soviet Union we heard "political" jokes and also heard that they were written by CIA. It was not generally believed to be true. Even mocked later, like "You think Soviets could not come up with jokes on their own?"
But now I started to think this could be true to certain extent. There were collections of such jokes printed abroad and smuggled into USSR. This does not mean they were printed by CIA, of course. But there is also tone of those jokes.
They were not the kind of jokes that point out something like low quality of goods or services (Reagan retold a few of these; such jokes were widespread and absolutely legal, there were numerous official satirical magazines that had them in spades). These was, for example, a series of jokes about a certain Civil war figure. There was a movie about him ("Chapaev", last name) that was immensely popular in USSR. In the series of jokes he and his comrades appeared as the filthiest and stupidiest scoundrels. There also was a serie of jokes about "War and Peace" figures (Rostova, Bolkonsky, etc.), with exactly same approach.
What started that process was a rather dull and artificial joke that turned out to mock an end scene of some war movie. I somehow missed that movie in my youth, but I knew the title of it, the movie and the book it was based on were well known. But once I saw it I clearly saw that the joke was meant to mock the movie; there is no other explanation.
Thing is, the scene should not be mocked. William James wrote that a characteristic quality of a religious experience was a feeling of seriousness; "not all is vanity". This feeling was very alive in USSR, even though it was a formally atheist country. We clearly understood that as kids. Not because you will be punished, mind you, but because this will harm you.
With that understanding I reevaluated the other jokes and indeed the intent was same. I also remembered certain songs that also appeared about that time; they were called "emigrant songs" and, apparently, they were recorded in Russian neigbourhoods of New York. They were in fantastically bad taste; yet they were everywhere.
Bad taste and bad jokes don't need CIA; but now I think CIA indeed played a part by giving all that a much bugger scale that might have happened organically.
Oh man, I just listened to an episode of Decoder Ring about why making classical realist sculptures in the US is a challenge. It gives some interesting context about the rejection of realism in the post-war West:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
Thanks so much for sharing this! I went looking for what I’d call modern “masterwork” statues a year or so ago and had come to this exact same conclusion. Glad that other people are noticing!
Maybe that is why realism is chased so much in video games in the west, while eastern countries rarely are interested.
Related. Others?
Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 - Aug 2015 (133 comments)
Man, this might be a case where the average HN reader is less informed than the general public.
I thought this was well known. Like, the Men In Black movies literally have a scene lampshading this.
What you observe, elevate, worship is the same thing. The modern culture want you to worship individuality, expression, pleasure, etc.
The result is the destruction of society, of the building blocks, what remain is atomic individuals and a central power structure that always control more and centralise.
Our roots was to worship Christ (self sacrifice for love and truth) with that sweept aside, we worship pleasure, ourselves, the intellect, etc. We are much easier to control than stuborn truth believer that are ready to die for it.
Hah! Nothing new;
"All Art is Propaganda" is a well known quote by various authors - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/04/08/art-propaganda/
Also George Orwell wrote a set of essays under that name (though he was primarily indicating Language/Literature) - https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays
I feel like absolutely everything is a PsyOp. I mean look at how many big cities there are around the world, how many millions of people working in office buildings; every single day; thinking, crafting emails, organizing events, coordinating, writing up marketing, creating PowerPoint slides, filling out Excel sheets, writing up reports, writing up project briefs... Millions of brains and machines manipulating information.
I would be surprised if there's anything which is of any interest to any meaningful group of humans which is not a PsyOp.
"Coffee break is over, stop thinking and get back to work."
Art and cultural movements are a favorite vehicle for any country to serve its intelligence interests. An example is Goethe-Institut
I was hoping they would go into how modern printing made lithography a household method. Then maybe go about protecting intellectual property from convincing replica's. They didn't go into that. Not even a passing reference into Tenet.
Incredible to believe the CIA has more sway over artistic movements than actual artists.
Wealthy patronage has always steered art, and the CIA has a lot of money.
The CIA hires "actual" artists, all the time and in great numbers. They have a creative writing division.
If you watch YouTube interviews/documentaries about the CIA, one of the things that all of them point out is the disguise division, which makes some fascinating facemasks and other disguises.
More incredible to believe the most powerful clandestine agency in the world wouldn't want to hold sway over artistic movements to their own end.
And the CIA actually had rather good taste
Or they do bend public opinion on what "good taste" is
Wait til you find out what the GIA[1] did with other forms of cultural expression and education - like motion pictures, music, television, and academia
[1]: Global Intelligence Agency - because we know that they have deep reach into every nation at this point and are only accountable to themselves.
Are you referring to the way they always have to portray the American army as the heroic winners of every war?
1 reply →
Before yielding to concern about CIA influence in modern art, consider what they would have been up against. Situationism and the post-surrealist projects were wildly successful tactics to demoralize western culture and separate it from a sense of purpose and identity. Do you think Punk was entirely organic, or did it get nudges and windfalls from interested parties?
I was involved in the industrial/alternative club scenes in the 90's and the degrees of separation of those bands from what we would call obvious influence operations today are few. If someone were to design a cost effective machine for cultivating troubled loners into a recruitment pipeline for a sabotage and activism capacity, a few thousand dollars here and there to promote and exalt some drug addicts making angry subversive noise would be the way to do it. Night life and its various vices and perversions was such a fantastically successful anti-capitalist operation that if you ask a modern CIA agent what flag sits on their boss' desk today, they will tell you there is more than one.
In the words of John Lydon, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"
Policies shape directions. That is a fact. It can happen with legislature, funding, para-military and corruption.
Art can be a direction shaped with above methods.
Soft power - Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop.
True Soft Power - Hollywood, and associated media industry, which happens to be the platform through which "Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop", etc. reach people.
With the Internet and some competing heavy-weights, it may no longer be an US soft superpower it was before, but it still retains its important quality: it's ubiquitous, ever-present, and so enormous it's hard to notice - much like fish don't think much about the water they swim in.
K-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.
and dont forget the pandas
Chinese pandas, the reward for friends. Not friends? No pandas for you!
(2020)
Some previous discussion:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204
Sounds like modern art was the kpop of its era.
Oddly enough kpop is the result of American music taking over the world.
I remember from one of my art history courses that it was more a rejection of Hitler & Stalin. Those 2 loved representational art so much that "the art world" took decades before representational art was acceptable.
Soon to overtaken by nkpop if I'm reading the room accurately.
As usual it seems any headline ending in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
I’m sure there have been numerous articles about this over the years
splitting a canvas in two is a perfect "art form" that anyone can do to launder some millions into "honestly earned" money...
I don’t know if this is a reaction to AI or something, but recently I’ve only been interested in classical/realism art. I just can’t do abstract cubes anymore. The default wallpaper of windows 11 is a perfect example - I hate it. Give me a wallpaper of some painting from the Renaissance.
Kinda paradox because AI seems better at replicating complex classic paintings and realism than rather simple modern parametric imagery.
until you begin to really LOOK at it
1 reply →
It’s not about what ai can or can’t do. It’s a new appreciation for both artistry AND skill.
Fun fact - the default Windows 10 wallpaper was actually shot on a real camera in physical space[0], making it one of the exceptions. It's disappointing that they went back to 3D renders in 11, but it was probably done so they could make their light and dark mode versions match exactly.
[0] https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
And the hillside on Windows XP is also a photo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(photograph)#
i wonder about this too.
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
That is an interesting thought. To me I think I think my brain is being re wired to appreciate effort. Not saying there isn’t modern art that doesn’t take effort. But paintings from the masters is a good place to start.
> I just can’t do abstract cubes anymore
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
I feel like a picture of rolling hills with spring wheat and a blue sky wouldn’t go amiss
They should bring it back
I had to laugh out loud when I read the title. Blaming everything on the CIA seems to be the raison du joure these days.
"raison du joure these days"
I had to laugh out loud too when I read this.
Pretty embarrassing that this is the title of a post on JSTOR.
Modern art started in the late 1800s, long before the CIA or its predecessor existed. Using this term to describe contemporary art, or abstract art more generally, is an (anti?) shibboleth that indicates you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I realize the article is about mid century artists, but I’m certain it’s being upvoted here because people think the title is referring to contemporary, 21st century art.
If you meant something more specific, like abstract expressionism, then again, it’s mostly just a continuation of previous trends. Sure, the government sponsored some things, but it’s not as if postwar American artists invented the entire concept of modern art (which is what the article seems to be implying.)
And if you meant very abstract / performance contemporary art, the kind of thing uninformed people like to describe as modern art, again, most of that got started in the 60s (with antecedents in the 10s, 20s, etc.) and was mostly by people the CIA thought were subversives.
Did you actually read the article? It lays out a pretty compelling case that the CIA established funding sources and magazines to popularize American modern art and make it a worldwide phenomenon / a cultural export to have Americans be taken seriously as taste makers.
Yes, I did and as I said, the title is pretty out of line with the actual article. Which itself has almost zero mention of modern art / 1930s-40-50s art outside of the American context.
Modern art was not a CIA psy op. Modern art precedes the CIA by a century. Mid-century American art was popularized in part by American government organizations. These are entirely different claims.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
1 reply →
The resistance to abstraction in the early 1900s came from a failed art student named Adolf Hitler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_exhibition). It was amplified by post-war Soviet propaganda and that is what the CIA was poking at during late modernism. Hitler and the Soviets wanted social realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism) to offer idealized citizens, not individual expression or any kind of doubt really. They are not the only ones. Post-George Floyd exhibitions pivoted heavily to representation and social realism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Sherald). That is still happening. The latest is none other than Trump and Pete Hegseth, who post classic German propaganda style AI images of young white people in working class contexts.
Abstract Expressionism was the pinnacle of modern art and was much more than a style or aesthetic. It was a total embrace of pure individuality. That's why it has been resisted by every social movement since. It is the essence of non-conformity. Political groups require conformity.
Just gonna leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art...
Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo
Your tax dollars, hard at work!
Holy shit that track rips. Thanks!
Sounds like it was more about spreading American culture as part of the Cold War. This feels a lot more benign compared to Modernist architecture which seems to have fascist tendencies what with Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson being literal Nazi sympathizers.
The art itself is not a psyop and it can't be because it's too abstract to send a political message. The movement around it was supported in a CIA psyop to present America as the place where artists are free to do what they want, at a time when the Soviet Union enforced socialist realism as the only official art style and if you did something different you couldn't get state funding. It was a good old PR move.
A lot of people misunderstand this and think it's some conspiracy to demoralize society and "erase Western culture". If that was true there would be witch hunts against traditional art and calls to destroy it.
When you look at the real abstract artists they used language about freedom to make art outside its traditional constraints and encouraged others to try it out, but I don't think any large group of them ever wanted to fully replace and condemn the old ways. Some definitely switched their style to fit in but as far as I know it was all voluntary.
> if you did something different you couldn't get state funding
RTFA. This is literally what the CIA did, to soft-blacklist marxists and prevent them from becoming successful artists
yet another case of an editor writing a clickbait headline for a much more nuanced article about a very specific and interesting topic
it both makes sense and seems very obvious that the CIA utilized an artistic movement as both a tool of internal domestic propaganda (excluding Soviet art which was incredible for its time due to actually being publicly funded) and to push soft power overseas by dangling inclusion in supposedly prestigious cultural institutions (ie mostly playthings of the rich, populated with the owned art of the rich with the blessing of the government which increased the cultural prestige and thus later sale value of the art)
a more honest title might be 'Is the way we perceive modern art influenced by Cold War American propaganda'? but I suppose that wouldn't have Gen Z and Alpha clicking through and learning how culturally bankrupt things are in the West, and how pervasive and invisibilized so much of our domestic propaganda is
another example of this might be the way nonviolence as a protest strategy just happened to be greatly encouraged by the rich and CIA-connected [0] [1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmL7Ph4Us8o&lc
[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...
yes
yes, it was
And here I was thinking any psyop was necessarily bad.
The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by someone else.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves.
Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power.
But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.
9 replies →
I wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.
1 reply →
Yeah, if that’s true we should get those people their own agency and let them manage museums
Are you saying modern art is positive?
Do you not appreciate art?
27 replies →
Betteridge’s law prevails. A fun read, but not as fun as the title suggests.
tl;dr Modern art existed before the CIA and even CIA predecessors did not originate it, but they did push it abroad to show that America is great because we put up with modern art made by socialists depite most americans disliking both the art and the artists
Exactly, it is a weird title. Modern art is as much of a "psy-op" as:
and just about anything. Cultural "warfare" is a different ballgame. K-Pop and K-dramas are "cultural warfare" from Korea. J-pop and anime from Japan (here's a clickbait title: Was Studio Ghibli a Japanese Psy-Op?). So is Thai Food and avocados. Anything that makes the country look good or even become more well known outside its borders can be considered a "psy-op". But not in the sense that any reasonable person would interpret the term...
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
Books...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhQ5678cJU8
The interesting thing to me is, despite it being hard to imagine today, back then this was actually a strange thing, and did actually serve as a demonstration of American freedom of expression.
Hard to imagine today because this kind of weird art comes from just about everywhere with a few exceptions now.
Interesting to read about how it actually was the work of a few elite institutions that made this happen. Agreed the CIA angle is a bit weak, to me it's more a story about the Rockefellers and their compatriots who funded this stuff.
But I mean is this something that is supposed to be shocking or revelaing? All countries want to promote their culture so they win the soft war and influence. You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us? Look up what the south korean gov planned and how it worked out overall.
It is interesting they were taunting the Soviets by saying "look our artists are so free even we dont know wtf they are making but we support them!" rather than "look how amazing modern art is" lol
> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us?
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
1 reply →
Is calling everything a Psy-Op a Psy-Op?
Actually yes
Is calling that which calls everything a psy-op a psy-op also a psy-op?
More likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
lol i think the CIA is nowhere near competent enough to even consider that idea.
https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/15...
Who's behind the transgender psy-op? That's the one I really want to know.
> Who's behind the transgender psy-op?
Right wing nutjobs who think the most important thing in the world is what exists between your legs. A few years ago there were news stories about a family that decided to raise their child "gender free" and that they would not announce the gender of the child to the world. The outrage that story produced was astonishing. People who would never in their entire life meet that kid were having fits because knowing what genitals that kid had was more important than anything else in their life.
Also the author of Harry Potter stories is rabidly transphobic. She's spending millions of dollars on propaganda and hate groups. It is so bad that none of the actors who played in the HP movies want anything to do with her. She's so angry at that that she's financing remakes of the movies with politically reliable/subservient staff & actors.
She's spending her time and money advocating for women's rights, actually.
1 reply →
“educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”
Funny how times have changed and more or less everyone on every side is fighting for the strength and survival of their own groupthink and little more.
Eventually, people realize they will never agree and therefore don't have to fight.
They realize the majority of their beliefs already existed before they were born and will continue on after they're dead. They have nothing to add to the conversation while they are too busy fighting. They turn their focus to developing their ideas peacefully and let their subcultures flourish once again.
This isn't the first cycle and won't be the last. The last major cycle was in the 20th century due to broadcast media. I think people sometimes forget how relatively young the internet is.
"Live and let live" is in fundamental tension with "protect the weak." ALL aggressive ideologies act as heroes protecting others from oppression. There is a barely expressible thing that allows people to live in peace with those they disagree with. It is a personality trait, an aesthetic, a mood associated with the best of the Enlightenment but never described by it. Perhaps people need relative silence, a few good books, physical labor, hand-made goods, and slow travel to attain it. I often wonder at how boldly people think they can reduce the enormous, holistic experience of being of a particular time and place and call the effect simply "reason".
2 replies →
This is just another 'people should just agree with me' that operates on a meta-level.
1 reply →
I don't think it was genuine then as well, just a slogan for "fighting the communists".
You lie today, you lied then.
Same with "let my people go" for the Soviet jews, it was more about draining the "human capital" from USSR.
Colleges generally cleave between the humanities and science. The humanities, one will discover, often have a highly left/liberal lean. If you happen not to have that lean, you will probably find yourself over in the sciences somewhere.