Comment by gizajob
14 days ago
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.
This would still take at least time. But it's a bit more layered. Art must be original. But the originality cannot be the aim of art. It will emerge itself if the artist strives for truth, because all the originality is already given to him by the true Creator.
Modern artists aim solely for originality. As a result modern art consists of nothing else. It's empty; fake. At the same time it does require ever increasing effort to find something superficially new; like crypto mining. That is still a fulltime job, that's true.
"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.