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Whoa! I knew that CIA funded Abstract Expressionist Art (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia https://www.bbc.com/cul

by Jun8 11mo ago

Whoa! I knew that CIA funded Abstract Expressionist Art (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...) to underline American individualism and mental superiority over Soviet Russia (some say that's why "modern art" sucks, but see this excellent writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ifnq9v/the_cia_and_modern_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ifnq9v/the_cia_...). However, involvement in Paris Review boggles my mind because, I love that magazine.

coldtea 11mo ago
>to underline American individualism "So individual that it's manipulated by a state agency!" That really showed them those commies manipulated by their state agencies, ...oh wait!
- lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
  The best manipulation makes you think it was your idea in the first place.
  - dredmorbius 11mo ago
    A/K/A the Art of Herding Cats.
- chemotaxis 11mo ago
  But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked. Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.
  - bofadeez 11mo ago
    Yeah that's what did it. What kind of world would we live in without art propaganda where USSR didn't collapse? Too horrific to even imagine.
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now... the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
  - coldtea 11mo ago
    >if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now... Because wonderful things win over non-wonderful things in history? Yeah, sounds like a perfect criterion... Besides, it never had a chance on an equal playing ground and have several things holding it down (including being implemented in countries that were underdeveloped to begin with, and with the full Cold War power of the biggest countries on Earth breathing down their necks, plus schemes ranging from mild like that in TFA to way worse going on against it). Even so, for many of those that did live through it, there was a considerable pining for that era (for exampes ostalgie in ex-Eastern Germany), and some quite favorable polls in the later 90s even. Now, over 35 years on, it's mostly people who were raised entirely or in the biggest part after it that have the strongest opinions against it. >the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling Yeah, god forbid somebody answers back... Don't they know they're supposed to just hate one side and praise the other?
Atlas667 11mo ago
They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, depth, reason and humanity in the west was defined through the lens of the CIA. It was done so well it still resonates. Dr. Gabriel Rockhill does excellent work expounding on this in his discussion "The Intellectual World War: Class Struggle in Theory". He studied in France under Derrida, Iragray, Badiou, Foucaultians, and other prominent thinkers and came to discover the connections himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.
- bazoom42 11mo ago
  They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist. It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
  - ta12653421 11mo ago
    ...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
  - rixed 11mo ago
    This is what conspiracy theorists fail to keep in mind: in politics usually you do not create anything, you reframe and exploit whatever events happen to occur. Same idea with this left-wing idea that "no revolutionary has ever made a revolution to happen". I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
    - jack_tripper 11mo ago
      >to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
pessimizer 11mo ago
The CIA funded an enormous amount of the anti-Communist left and elite art. It was the best investment they ever made. I'm sorry, but that confident citation of the reddit thread is the same confident dismissal that CIA funded outlets were giving contemporaneously. The CIA didn't "come up" with abstract expression, it poured money into it (and mostly the ecosystem around it) and made it far more dominant than it would have been. The way you got a book published about art is to have indirectly taken money from the CIA at many points in your career, likely with absolutely no awareness of it. The reasons those paintings were selling for enormous amounts of money, especially to institutions, is because intelligence would grease the wheels on some other deal they wanted to make, and buying a painting that was just paint splatter was the payment. That created a market that unconnected people would enter organically, and tastes would reconfigure around what sold (because art is what rich people will pay for.) It's a tactic that is still very much active for the intelligence services. They offer quid pro quo to shills who finance things that they want to happen. They finance media outlets who employ critics and pundits with the tastes they want to encourage, and fluff the incomes and find tax breaks (or just direct grants) for the people that produce the stuff. And upper-middle class elites follow the herd and ridicule the people who don't understand nuance. Now it's so cheap, too. They just have to hand out "upvotes" and get control of the algorithms. They don't even have to write the comments, just virtually praise establishment-loving morons who will say anything for more praise. Also make sure they never go broke or stay in jail for more than a week or two.
- benchly 11mo ago
  Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.
  - brazukadev 11mo ago
    You are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
  - mikkupikku 11mo ago
    TBQH there was never a time when it didn't seem like a psyop to see paint splashed on canvas being treated as a monumental artistic achievement and if anybody didn't agree they were just outing themselves as uncultured swine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_T...
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
Looking at current US political situation with left being entirely inept with strongest point being "we're not the other guys" ... no, CIA funding modern art was not good
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
Also Time magazine. It's not uncommon to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain how propagandistic American media is. If anything, it's less coarse than the Soviet variety. So, two reasons: 1. The more conspicuous varieties of manipulation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere sensitized people to the existence of such manipulation everywhere else, even in subtler and more insidious forms. 2. The classic "fish don't know what water is": what Americans can't see, because they were raised from birth and marinating in it, foreigners can spot more readily by contrast. And because the US was effectively a sort of godfather and guardian of countries west of the Iron Curtain following the War, it had a lot of pull with the media in those countries and cooperated with the appropriate people to promote and cement the Pax Americana.
- throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
  3. You can actually afford to bring more nuanced, maybe even self-critical reports because your moral baseline is more then a superficial symbol like "freedom".
  - SauntSolaire 11mo ago
    How to make heavy handed propaganda out to be a virtue.
    - czl 11mo ago
      Faced with subtle lies you may prefer the obvious ones.
      - underlipton 11mo ago
        That depends on whether or not the obviousness of the lies tracks with the zeal with which atrocities enabled by that dislocation from reality are undertaken. But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.
  - dbtc 11mo ago
    3.1. Might is right and money helps the medicine go down.

by Jun8 11mo ago

coldtea 11mo ago

>to underline American individualism "So individual that it's manipulated by a state agency!" That really showed them those commies manipulated by their state agencies, ...oh wait!

lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
The best manipulation makes you think it was your idea in the first place.
- dredmorbius 11mo ago
  A/K/A the Art of Herding Cats.
chemotaxis 11mo ago
But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked. Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.
- bofadeez 11mo ago
  Yeah that's what did it. What kind of world would we live in without art propaganda where USSR didn't collapse? Too horrific to even imagine.
red-iron-pine 11mo ago
if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now... the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
- coldtea 11mo ago
  >if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now... Because wonderful things win over non-wonderful things in history? Yeah, sounds like a perfect criterion... Besides, it never had a chance on an equal playing ground and have several things holding it down (including being implemented in countries that were underdeveloped to begin with, and with the full Cold War power of the biggest countries on Earth breathing down their necks, plus schemes ranging from mild like that in TFA to way worse going on against it). Even so, for many of those that did live through it, there was a considerable pining for that era (for exampes ostalgie in ex-Eastern Germany), and some quite favorable polls in the later 90s even. Now, over 35 years on, it's mostly people who were raised entirely or in the biggest part after it that have the strongest opinions against it. >the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling Yeah, god forbid somebody answers back... Don't they know they're supposed to just hate one side and praise the other?

Atlas667 11mo ago

They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, depth, reason and humanity in the west was defined through the lens of the CIA. It was done so well it still resonates. Dr. Gabriel Rockhill does excellent work expounding on this in his discussion "The Intellectual World War: Class Struggle in Theory". He studied in France under Derrida, Iragray, Badiou, Foucaultians, and other prominent thinkers and came to discover the connections himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.

bazoom42 11mo ago
They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist. It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
- ta12653421 11mo ago
  ...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
- rixed 11mo ago
  This is what conspiracy theorists fail to keep in mind: in politics usually you do not create anything, you reframe and exploit whatever events happen to occur. Same idea with this left-wing idea that "no revolutionary has ever made a revolution to happen". I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
  - jack_tripper 11mo ago
    >to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.

pessimizer 11mo ago

The CIA funded an enormous amount of the anti-Communist left and elite art. It was the best investment they ever made. I'm sorry, but that confident citation of the reddit thread is the same confident dismissal that CIA funded outlets were giving contemporaneously. The CIA didn't "come up" with abstract expression, it poured money into it (and mostly the ecosystem around it) and made it far more dominant than it would have been. The way you got a book published about art is to have indirectly taken money from the CIA at many points in your career, likely with absolutely no awareness of it. The reasons those paintings were selling for enormous amounts of money, especially to institutions, is because intelligence would grease the wheels on some other deal they wanted to make, and buying a painting that was just paint splatter was the payment. That created a market that unconnected people would enter organically, and tastes would reconfigure around what sold (because art is what rich people will pay for.) It's a tactic that is still very much active for the intelligence services. They offer quid pro quo to shills who finance things that they want to happen. They finance media outlets who employ critics and pundits with the tastes they want to encourage, and fluff the incomes and find tax breaks (or just direct grants) for the people that produce the stuff. And upper-middle class elites follow the herd and ridicule the people who don't understand nuance. Now it's so cheap, too. They just have to hand out "upvotes" and get control of the algorithms. They don't even have to write the comments, just virtually praise establishment-loving morons who will say anything for more praise. Also make sure they never go broke or stay in jail for more than a week or two.

benchly 11mo ago
Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.
- brazukadev 11mo ago
  You are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  TBQH there was never a time when it didn't seem like a psyop to see paint splashed on canvas being treated as a monumental artistic achievement and if anybody didn't agree they were just outing themselves as uncultured swine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_T...

PunchyHamster 11mo ago

Looking at current US political situation with left being entirely inept with strongest point being "we're not the other guys" ... no, CIA funding modern art was not good

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

lo_zamoyski 11mo ago

Also Time magazine. It's not uncommon to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain how propagandistic American media is. If anything, it's less coarse than the Soviet variety. So, two reasons: 1. The more conspicuous varieties of manipulation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere sensitized people to the existence of such manipulation everywhere else, even in subtler and more insidious forms. 2. The classic "fish don't know what water is": what Americans can't see, because they were raised from birth and marinating in it, foreigners can spot more readily by contrast. And because the US was effectively a sort of godfather and guardian of countries west of the Iron Curtain following the War, it had a lot of pull with the media in those countries and cooperated with the appropriate people to promote and cement the Pax Americana.

throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
3. You can actually afford to bring more nuanced, maybe even self-critical reports because your moral baseline is more then a superficial symbol like "freedom".
- SauntSolaire 11mo ago
  How to make heavy handed propaganda out to be a virtue.
  - czl 11mo ago
    Faced with subtle lies you may prefer the obvious ones.
    - underlipton 11mo ago
      That depends on whether or not the obviousness of the lies tracks with the zeal with which atrocities enabled by that dislocation from reality are undertaken. But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.
- dbtc 11mo ago
  3.1. Might is right and money helps the medicine go down.