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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 o
by pessimizer 1y 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 1y agoSome days, everything feels like one big psyop.
- brazukadev 1y agoYou are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
- mikkupikku 1y agoTBQH 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...
- potato3732842 1y ago<sigh> We are all pysops, comrade. On a more serious note, he's actually making a very good point. This isn't something just the CIA does. You'll see industry trade groups and big business do it too. They just have less money so they're more surgical about it.
- pessimizer 1y agoThey have more than enough money, it's cheap. The astounding thing about middle-class people is that you can pay them to do this for a living, and they somehow still won't think it exists. It wouldn't survive if they didn't provide the marketing and infrastructure. It's important to remember that most will do it for free because they simply don't apply any standards to their defense of institutions (especially the ones who pay their rent.) You don't have to pay a ton of people to pretend that google paying firefox half a billion dollars a year for absolutely nothing makes perfect financial sense. Just pay a dozen, and praise and reward everybody who repeats it. You'll have an ocean of idiotic shallow dismissals barked out by volunteers. Give them updoots and they'll glow. edit: here's the crackpot theory (everything else I said is documented in a million places, and not worth defending.) I think that the intensity of this tactic over the past 100 years in every aspect of Western life has been intellectually dysgenic. It has devastated western elites' thought processes in general, and the compartmentalization that allowed them to be competent in their actual jobs has failed. Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce.
- brazukadev 1y ago> Give them updoots and they'll glow. Sometimes, just hiring them and dumping later is enough. The amount of ex-FAANG (mainly Google) "volunteers" brigading in this forum to defend anything Google is astonishing.
- fiatpandas 1y agoIf the Firefox deal doesn’t make sense (too much?), then what is the hidden strategic rationale? >Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce 100%. This terrifies me. Loss of compartmentalization in society, mostly due to the internet, needs examination.