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Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
- NordStreamYacht 1mo agoMore likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
- Barbing 1mo agoAnd here I was thinking any psyop was necessarily bad.
- gigatree 1mo agoAre you saying modern art is positive?
- math-man 1mo agoDo you not appreciate art?
- NordStreamYacht 1mo agoI like bananas. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-banana-sells-for-6-2-million-at-an-art-auction https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
- innis226 1mo agoOkay, this is a bit too far xD. But I wouldn’t put this in the same bucket as Pollock. I genuinely find his work interesting.
- NordStreamYacht 1mo agoModern art is weird. https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/ https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/
- evanjrowley 1mo agoThat's postmodern art, not modern art.
- soulofmischief 1mo agoI agree. All I see here is someone following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Andy Warhol. His own pink banana was very polarizing in his time.
- evanjrowley 1mo agoAndy Warhol - also a postmodernist
- soulofmischief 1mo agoYes, I called him a pioneer.
- andrewmlevy 1mo agorelevant! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM4tPXaLYz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM4tPXaLYz8
- evanjrowley 1mo agoThat's postmodern art, not modern art.
- NordStreamYacht 1mo agoSo that's a post-banana?
- bigstrat2003 1mo agoI love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
- karmakurtisaani 1mo agoThis could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.
- nine_k 1mo agoIndeed. Once galleries became significant buyers of art, scandalous art became an attractive thing to produce: it commanded outsized attention. The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
- refactor_master 1mo ago1850? I wager we could go all the way back if we tried. > (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art
- karmakurtisaani 1mo agoIndeed, I would not be surprised if there was someone calling the first cave paintings awful vandalism. I just thought of mid 1800s, since around that time people got really experimental with different styles of painting.
- dgellow 1mo ago« Too many notes, your majesty » https://youtu.be/H6_eqxh-Qok?si=zGXsyHk_XF3Gu2o_ https://youtu.be/H6_eqxh-Qok?si=zGXsyHk_XF3Gu2o_
- cindyllm 1mo ago
- greenavocado 1mo ago[flagged]
- al_borland 1mo agoShould we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate? Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art. Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
- colechristensen 1mo agoThe 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?
- left-struck 1mo agoI 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.
- verisimi 1mo ago> I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves. This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.
- left-struck 1mo agoHow would that be manipulative?
- verisimi 1mo agoIf you alter people's natural behaviour so that they are less manipulative, do you think this is the same as having not taken that action? It is a (further) unnatural intervention. It would be like giving someone an emetic because they ate too much. The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree. The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.
- dgellow 1mo agoYeah, if that’s true we should get those people their own agency and let them manage museums
- colechristensen 1mo ago“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.
- sublinear 1mo agoEventually, 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.
- simpaticoder 1mo ago"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".
- attila-lendvai 1mo agoi agree with your sentiment, but what you disagree in is crucial here. there's a class of topics where disagreement means the death and dispair of one side. hoping to live and let live, with a disagreeing party that doesn't "let live", is a fool's errand.
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- Eufrat 1mo agoSounds 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.
- mauvehaus 1mo agoOh 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-bad-at-statues/id1376577202?i=1000774964376 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
- wincy 1mo agoThanks 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!
- OroPla 1mo agoMaybe that is why realism is chased so much in video games in the west, while eastern countries rarely are interested.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agoJust gonna leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Arts_v._Finley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art... Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo Your tax dollars, hard at work!
- moron4hire 1mo agoHoly shit that track rips. Thanks!
- mikert89 1mo agoFar 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.
- pkul 1mo agoI 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.
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- zmgsabst 1mo agoIs 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.
- Barrin92 1mo ago>would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage this seems entire implausible. Many of the expressionist, surrealist or modernist artists were European refugees who fled fascism, the government apparently spent less on their efforts than an average regional election today costs, and expressionism still exists. This is the American equivalent of one of those 'are the Chinese behind this' conspiracies every time anything Chinese starts to be popular. Governments who can't get things done for billions apparently suddenly can invent entire art forms with a few million bucks. No doubt there were people who thought abstract art would make for good advertisement for American liberalism, but no they did not invent, steer or even meaningfully influence it
- WD-42 1mo agoI 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.
- tacitusarc 1mo agoI feel like a picture of rolling hills with spring wheat and a blue sky wouldn’t go amiss
- WD-42 1mo agoThey should bring it back
- rramon 1mo agoKinda paradox because AI seems better at replicating complex classic paintings and realism than rather simple modern parametric imagery.
- tavavex 1mo agoFun 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 https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
- claytonjy 1mo agoBetteridge’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
- zhivota 1mo agoThe 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.
- altmanaltman 1mo agoBut 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
- 331c8c71 1mo ago> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us? How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
- altmanaltman 1mo agoNo, I don't think K-pop is a government initiative. It is an actual fact. > In the late '90s, when Asia went through a huge financial crisis, South Korea's leaders decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. So the country's government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351/how-the-south-korean-government-made-k-pop-a-thing https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351... British Invasion was not a state thing.
- lattice_epochs 1mo agoSounds like modern art was the kpop of its era.
- analog31 1mo agoOddly enough kpop is the result of American music taking over the world.
- BLKNSLVR 1mo agoSoon to overtaken by nkpop if I'm reading the room accurately.
- Tangurena2 1mo agoI 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.
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- ChrisArchitect 1mo ago(2020) Some previous discussion: 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204
- senectus1 1mo agolol i think the CIA is nowhere near competent enough to even consider that idea.
- dang 1mo agohttps://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/1595589147/ https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/15...
- keiferski 1mo agoPretty 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.
- vlovich123 1mo agoDid 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.
- keiferski 1mo agoYes, 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.
- jibal 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 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".
- ks2048 1mo agoIs calling everything a Psy-Op a Psy-Op?
- dang 1mo agoRelated. Others? Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 - June 2023 (332 comments) Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 - June 2020 (7 comments) Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987770 (Feb 2025) Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587547 - Aug 2019 (33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602 (Oct 2015) Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 - Aug 2015 (133 comments)
- jychang 1mo agoMan, 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.
- rbbydotdev 1mo agoIncredible to believe the CIA has more sway over artistic movements than actual artists.
- onion2k 1mo agoWealthy patronage has always steered art, and the CIA has a lot of money.
- dreambuffer 1mo agoThe CIA hires "actual" artists, all the time and in great numbers. They have a creative writing division.
- Tangurena2 1mo agoIf 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.
- featwanz 1mo agoMore incredible to believe the most powerful clandestine agency in the world wouldn't want to hold sway over artistic movements to their own end.
- uxhacker 1mo agoAnd the CIA actually had rather good taste
- u8080 1mo agoOr they do bend public opinion on what "good taste" is
- afpx 1mo agoWait 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.
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- fithisux 1mo agoPolicies 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.
- pir8life4me 1mo agoSoft power - Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop.
- riffruff24 1mo agoand dont forget the pandas
- pir8life4me 1mo agoChinese pandas, the reward for friends. Not friends? No pandas for you!
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- TeMPOraL 1mo agoTrue 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.
- Semkas 1mo agoK-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.
- gizajob 1mo agoThe 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.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1mo agoArt became an investment and artistic properties ceased to matter.
- gizajob 1mo agoThe 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.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1mo agoThis 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.
- nemo 1mo ago"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).
- hn_submit 1mo agoI had to laugh out loud when I read the title. Blaming everything on the CIA seems to be the raison du joure these days.
- hahamaster 1mo ago"raison du joure these days" I had to laugh out loud too when I read this.
- attila-lendvai 1mo agosplitting a canvas in two is a perfect "art form" that anyone can do to launder some millions into "honestly earned" money...
- ivan_gammel 1mo agoNot 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).
- AlecSchueler 1mo agoBy "modern art" they mean things like abstract expressionism.
- ivan_gammel 1mo agoReduction 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.
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- philipallstar 1mo agoNo, those are not the same. You might say it's like reducing superhero movies to "superhero movies made in the last 20 years", which actually most people do, and it's mostly understandable. Maybe those people wouldn't have what you'd call a "genuine interest in the superhero genre" but who cares? They weren't trying to demonstrate that, and what they were saying didn't require it.
- jongjong 1mo agoI 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.
- indy 1mo ago"Coffee break is over, stop thinking and get back to work."
- Neil44 1mo agoAs usual it seems any headline ending in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
- coldtea 1mo agoA 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.
- FLeXMurphy 1mo ago[flagged]
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- coldtea 1mo agoIt'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.
- MachineMan 1mo agoOld 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.
- modo_mario 1mo agoMaybe 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.
- CGMthrowaway 1mo ago>It self-propagates Part of the design spec of the psyop, perhaps
- MachineMan 1mo agoI 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.
- nullbio 1mo agoWho's behind the transgender psy-op? That's the one I really want to know.
- Tangurena2 1mo ago> 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.
- ionwake 1mo agoI’m sure there have been numerous articles about this over the years
- kittikitti 1mo agoI 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.
- thataccount 1mo agoColleges 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.
- tancop 1mo agoThe 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.
- jackb4040 1mo ago> 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
- tpurves 1mo agoLiterally 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.
- foolinaround 1mo agowhat 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
- Gud 1mo agoThey invented what is called "Thai food" for the export market, to bring in tourists.
- jaredandrews 1mo agohttps://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-t...
- foolinaround 1mo agowow, did'nt know. but thats brilliant! however, i did wonder at the decor at my local thai restaurants and they were definitely using some ethnic pieces, and now I realize...
- red-iron-pine 1mo agonot just Thai, the Japanese, Koreans, even Ethiopia (sometimes) tries food based influence measures
- 1mo ago
- blini-kot 1mo agoyes yes, it was
- paimapi 1mo agoyet 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmL7Ph4Us8o&lc [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_protects_the_state https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...
- Mikhail_Edoshin 1mo agoWhen 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.
- motohagiography 1mo agoBefore 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?"
- FlyingBears 1mo agoArt and cultural movements are a favorite vehicle for any country to serve its intelligence interests. An example is Goethe-Institut
- alfor 1mo agoWhat 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.
- ogou 1mo agoThe resistance to abstraction in the early 1900s came from a failed art student named Adolf Hitler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_exhibition 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 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 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.
- rramadass 1mo agoHah! Nothing new; "All Art is Propaganda" is a well known quote by various authors - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/04/08/art-propaganda/ 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 https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays