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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
by reso 3y 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.
- toss1 3y agoEXACTLY! 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.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoyeah 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
- kennywinker 3y agoThere’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
- micromacrofoot 3y agobut 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?
- kennywinker 3y ago> is public education a psy-op? I mean, in a way it is. Public education in america teaches narratives of colonialism and history that are generally pro-america. Even when they touch on things critically, there is a general slant towards mythologizing and deifying. I.e. "Thomas Jefferson was a great man and founding father of our great nation. Also he owned slaves, which was bad, but it was a different time." Attempts to push a little deeper in terms of criticism are usually met with an aggressive push back (e.g. the "critical race theory" hullabaloo). > States don't license any doctor, they have to meet certain criteria The state has definitely used it's powers, tho I'm not sure if doctor licensing has been specifically used, to marginalize people with beliefs considered radical. e.g. during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism > are those state-level psy-ops? The term psy-op is specifically about information control and messaging, etc. So I wouldn't apply to just anything that the state does to advance an ideology. But I think it applies well to arts, which is all about ideas. It doesn't apply as well as a description of the use of doctor licensing to further an ideology. For tech companies, it depends on what the tech company does, i.e. a bunch of the FUD around tiktok is about the information control it represents. I don't think psy-op is a good description of an education system with state-directed biases. Because that's more of a long-term state project, rather than a short-term targeted influencing. To me education's pro-state issues are much better described by words like "bias" or "propaganda" or "indoctrination". Probably a longer answer than you were expecting, but I really do think cia-funding art + writing is pretty clearly a psy-op. That doesn't mean the artists they funded weren't real or good. It just means their level of success was partially the result of ideologically directed funding by the cia with the goal of influencing public opinion about communism/socialism.
- FreshStart 3y agoEven from a graveyard or dungheap good things can grow, aware of the past to leave behind The exceptionalism derived from accidents of history & circumstances is strange.
- Shish2k 3y agoThe things you’re describing are done by the government to its own citizens, theoretically for the benefit of the citizens; the things being described as psy-ops are a government controlling other countries’ citizens for the benefit of the government
- lotux 3y agoWhat was US values back then? If it was fighting USSR then it was a psy-op.
- lacy_tinpot 3y agoI see this as no different than the Renaissance being funded by Italian bankers and the church.
- nashashmi 3y agoThat 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.
- jerbearito 3y agoIt'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.
- UncleMeat 3y agoStates 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.
- lacy_tinpot 3y agoThe 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.
- jojobas 3y agoIt 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.
- tpm 3y agoPop-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.
- mjklin 3y agoJazz too!
- hedora 3y agoThe 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-tormented-to-death-handcuffed-to-her-hospital-bed 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.”
- petre 3y agoJazz 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.
- jojobas 3y agoThat's an interesting way to say she drank and doped herself to liver cirrhosis and heart failure.
- whateveracct 3y agoMakes sense. And makes sense this plays on HN. "Art is a joke" plays well with engineer types. Scared of what you don't understand?
- nearbuy 3y agoScared? 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.
- jancsika 3y ago> 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.
- tomcam 3y agoSpeak for yourself. I only get snickety.
- whateveracct 3y agoHave you seen a Jackson Pollock in person? Seen the thick paint on canvas? It's magnificent without context.
- tpm 3y agoIgnore 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.).
- 2devnull 3y agoI used to think I liked a lot of art that on deeper reflection I’ve realized isn’t good. It was just me experiencing social psychology. This is such a common human phenomenon that there’s a fable about it: the emperor who wears no clothes. People will mercilessly ridicule the kid who says the emperor is naked. There is a bit of that type of ridicule in this thread. It’s silly. All reasonable people will agree that while you may be able to call anything art, not everything can be good art. Only an occasional isolated snowshovel or urinal (or 3 as it were) can be art, and only in the ironic it’s not really art but it is ha ha sense. Yet people insist that anything can be validly described as a work of art, none of it any better or worse than the rest. Sorry, but that’s wrong, obviously so, and just deeply offensive to anyone who cares at all. It’s literally the negation of art, espoused by people who claim to love art.
- somenameforme 3y agoThis piece offers a limited perspective on what happened. There was quite a lot more than you can read about from other sources, such as this. [1] It wasn't just funding. The CIA setup an entire propaganda network, the 'Propaganda Assets Inventory', "which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organizations." The CIA was directly reciting stories on an international global level, was ensuring that only positive critiques were widely scene, and much more. They also ensured the funds necessary to keep spreading the art always were readily available, but that was almost inconsequential in contrast to their other interventions. Incidentally the CIA was also doing much of this behind the backs of Congress who were ostensibly opposed to such a scale of propaganda, back in the day. --- "We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War. "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret." -- Tom Braden, Head of CIA International Organizations Division [at the time when this was happening] [1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
- torginus 3y agoThis 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.
- trabant00 3y agoPeople 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.