
Modern art was CIA 'weapon' (1995) - prawn
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
======
Iv
"Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet
Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity,
the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art,
strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete."

In other words, the US acted like a good government and helped the arts
flourish, because it had a competition. It sounds like a joke, but in Us if
you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.

Write that open source software is a weapon against Chinese industry and
you'll get CIA funding. Heh, after all Tor got funds from the Navy...

~~~
edutechnion
> ... if you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.

In 1955, the NY Times led with "United States has Secret Sonic Weapon-Jazz"

    
    
      http://thereisjazzbeforetrane.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-has-sonic-secret-weapon-jazz-nytimes.html
    

Why did they fund jazz like they funded abstract expressionism? Jazz was the
ultimate display of democracy and integration, improvisation and the exchange
of ideas.

~~~
hansjorg
NPR had a program about this not long ago. According to them, many of the most
famous jazz musicians of the time, like Dizzy Gillespie, was sent abroad
backed by CIA and the State Department.

Several of the most high profile musicians subsequently dropped out of that
program after touring Europe for a while.

Supposedly the good reception they got in cosmopolitan centres like Paris put
their treatment by the US public and their handlers in the government in a
grim light.

------
compbio
Ok, that's solved. Now let's speculate on the current cultural weapons, that
the Russians can't keep up with, but that the Americans use to keep cultural
dominance:

\- The entire entertainment industry.

\- The LGBT-movement / Pussy Riot.

\- Social networks, the internet, email providers and search engines.

\- Quantum computing and advanced NLP.

Clearly they wanted to keep "the (perpetual) fight against terrorism" on this
list, but Russia did not listen.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
Video games specifically. They are next-gen propaganda tools because you can
subtly or not so subtly railroad a player into your frame by making them
roleplay it for reward. It can adapt to less or more pliant players, it can
collect analytics which help create faster iterations of improvement.

As an intentional cultural weapon (in the manner OP describes) I don't think
it's actually ascendant yet, but it will be.

------
Ygg2
Another possibility - CIA just sponsors random stuff to promote confusion in
enemy ranks. Then claims it was for Cold War purposes.

Adam Curtis spoke about Russian government vocally backing various
organizations, some hostile and some friendly to it. That way people are never
sure who to trust, because even opposition is funded by gov. One difference is
that Russians broadcast who they sponsor, given their target is the public.

Makes me wonder if CIA let slip it was using art as weapon to Russians, then
watch them panic.

~~~
VLM
I'd kick it back a step, maybe as a spy novel plot, its no secret that
"forever" the left promotes that all cultural advancement only comes from the
left, nothing culturally worth anything comes from the right. I'm not trying
to promote it, I'm trying to observe it. This has been a constant for an
extremely long time. Meanwhile the Russians were a little authoritarian and
locked down their art... why? Well one "spy novel grade of plot" is the
Americans will fall for the bait and then they can keep an eye on the
americans given that the artists tended left wing anyway.

Of course the rabbit hole never ends and a even more "spy novel plot" is the
americans knew the russians knew so seeing as modern art is pretty much a
waste of time WRT geopolitical struggles, we likely fed the artists a side
dish of disinformation knowing that some of the disinfo will get back to the
russians.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>the left promotes that all cultural advancement only comes from the left,
nothing culturally worth anything comes from the right.

The right promotes that idea too; or rather, that all (gov't sponsored)
cultural advancement only comes from the left.

~~~
cousin_it
I guess the orthodox right-wing view is that "progress" shouldn't apply to
culture at all, and that it actually ruins culture: a person thinking of
progress will never build the Sagrada Familia, only the Barbican Estate.
(Similar examples can be found for music, literature, the visual arts, etc.)

~~~
gglitch
We're saying Gaudi's work represents tradition?

~~~
cousin_it
Well, it's a Catholic basilica in a mostly Gothic style that's being built for
100 years. It incorporates some ideas that were new for its time, but so did
the Notre Dame (flying buttresses).

I guess traditionalists are not against all new ideas, they're more against
thinking that old = bad.

~~~
gglitch
I'm sure we can agree that anyone who builds a politics on anything as
reductive as [old|new] = [bad|good] is not helping much.

~~~
cousin_it
Just look at any left-wing art manifesto, there's plenty of those. Here's a
famous one from 1917 Russia:

[https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1...](https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1917/slap-
in-face-public-taste.htm)

~~~
gglitch
Yeah I'm sure it's occurred across the spectrum and throughout history.

~~~
cousin_it
Agreed :-)

------
mirimir
Also see this review of Saunders' _The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the
World of Arts and Letters_ (2000).

[https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joff...](https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joffet.html)

~~~
teh_klev
I own a copy, it's a fascinating read. The British author Ian McEwan mentions
that Saunders' book influenced his novel "Sweet Tooth" [0], which itself is a
fine read.

[0]:
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099578786](http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0099578786)

------
stratigos
The average American is likely to be completely clueless as to the cultural
influence of the CIA and other government agencies on their daily lives. And
this is just commentary on the things the agency has publicly admitted to.

~~~
cryoshon
Yeah, they're effectively our Ministry of Culture in the Orwellian sense.

------
laotzu
>Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends.
His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action
and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental
and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for
this reason. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the
counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and
freedom.

-Marshall McLuhan

------
tootie
Just to be pedantic, "Modern Art" is not synonymous with Abstract
Expressionism. Modern Art began with Goya in the early 19th century. It refers
to any of the schools of art that departed from the long traditions of
commissioned portraiture and religious art.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I've wondered: does that mean that anything that comes after is under the
umbrella of "Modern Art"? It seems like it should.

~~~
yarrel
Pretty much. I'd date artistic Modernism from Manet, but that's personal
taste. It's also open to debate when Modernism gave way to Post-Modernism -
Neo-Dada in the 50s, Minimalism or Conceptualism in the 60s?

We're currently on "Contemporary Art", which is going to be a hard label to
shake...

------
clock_tower
The deed is done, the Communists are beaten... so can we go back to art that
looks like things (and requires skill to create) now?

~~~
vlehto
No. Some jokes keep getting better if repeated.

Canning shit and presenting that as art piece is hilarious. Someone paying $37
for that canned shit in 1961 is even more hilarious. But somebody paying
£182,500 for that his is again even more hilarious. And just consider the
"inspiration" people get from that?

I shit you not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist's_Shit)

~~~
clock_tower
Art as a joke at the expense of art-buyers? I never thought of that angle, but
it does make sense.

~~~
vlehto
On many levels too. Imagine you have just gotten some utter crap into a
gallery. You are silently laughing at your own joke. And telling everybody
that "each person finds different aspect of it.. so I don't want to ruin that
with my analysis". Or some other snobbish shit.

Then some dude comes to you "I like it. Would 500k$ be enough?".

What do you respond? "Aww man, it's just a joke. That's too much." vs.
"Sold!"?

And the joke lives on.

------
agumonkey
What a weird bunch of decades. This neurotic competition against each's own
paranoia feels a bit absurd and sour. And I just finished watching a few NASA
movies again (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, ...) .. similar reasons.

~~~
njharman
You're falling for the trap of perspective. The current decade is just as
weird. We just don't know it yet.

~~~
agumonkey
Heh, who said I thought it was an improvement. Now I'm wondering, is it a
constant all through history ?

And I believe the hidden emotions of nations have been diluted into other
channels when wars (a large scale PTSD) and then scare crow competition were
the primary ones, nowadays it might be running in subtler ways.

------
TACIXAT
They also funded socialist literary magazines.

[http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-
sociali...](http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists-
funded-by-the-cia-ranked)

------
xlm1717
What's funny is that many on the right were convinced that abstract art was a
communist ruse intended to upend American culture and thus weaken the US.

The article does make you ask questions, though:

>If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of
Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it
was the CIA.

Was it just a matter of proving to the Soviets that America could be even more
cultured due to freedom of expression? Or was it the Trotskyites looking to
show that Stalin's brand of communism was inferior to Trotsky's? It does make
you wonder...

~~~
fiatjaf
Well, communist or not, it achieved these objectives.

------
mladenkovacevic
I guess even Michelangelo had the Medicis, but I wonder if something like this
will influence the auction prices for various modern art.

Does a painting like this
[http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_57.92.jpg](http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/images/h2/h2_57.92.jpg)
lose or gain new value in the context of being an unwitting participant in a
sophisticated exercise of distraction?

Does the artist's original intention behind his or her art take a second place
to the newly revealed absurdist quality?

------
SteveBash
I read about this a long time ago in the form of a conspiracy theory, I always
see people(even well educated ones) dismiss those and label it as false right
away, but seeing that many conspiracy theories have proven to be true I think
is time to recognize that this kind of thinking is a fallacy of the form X, X
is a conspiracy theory => X is false. So I think conspiracy theories should be
taken as what they are: hypotheses.

------
MichaelMoser123
i am not sure about the target audience of this sponsorship. Was it supposed
to persuade people in the west or in the east?

Modern art and Jazz were not very outspoken on political issues, it was very
easy to sponsor them as the artists were not likely to bite the hand that
feeds them (unlike Rock musicians who were much more unruly).

Maybe it was propaganda aimed at an western audience? You still have to claim
to be open minded and liberal and tell it to your own people; (see how we
tolerate modern art? The commies are less liberal, never mind that we are not
very liberal to minorities, blacks or those who we label to be communist
sympathizers)

i think in the east Rock music (later) was doing more damage to the communist
regimes (in real terms) than Jazz. Modern art and jazz had a more limited
appeal, while Rock music (later) had a much wider audience.

(modern art was brait is funny that the person that helped the CIA here (post
Stalin) was Khrushchev - in December 1962 he lashed out on modern art at a
modern art exhibition in Moscow, following that they started a official
campaign against modern art.)

~~~
MichaelMoser123
Here is some more information on this event that ended the cultural thaw in
the USSR.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_.E2.80.93_mid-1970s)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Neizvestny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Neizvestny)

Khrushchev lashed out on the artist Ernst Neizvestny, interstingly he seems to
have regretted that move once ousted, as Neizvestny was later approached by
Khrushchev's family to design the tomb/monument for the former general
secretary. go figure.

Maybe this modern art thing was designed to take some influence on the
direction of cultural discourse during the thaw (relative liberalization) of
the soviet union after the death of Stalin.

------
cousin_it
Ironically, the same kind of art was super popular in revolutionary Russia,
e.g. Malevich's "Black Square".

------
dschiptsov
Not sure about modern art, but Travolta shooting heroin in Pulp Fiction killed
thousands of Slavic youngsters..

------
kaonashi
It was also apolitical. That's one way to not have to deal with any new Diego
Riveras popping up.

------
hackuser
What are government intelligence agencies backing or opposing today?

~~~
flycaliguy
Based on some of the culture control ideas in this article, online piracy
doesn't seem far fetched. Pirates Bay could totally be a CIA backed site in
the end. Also bitcoin maybe? Wikileaks? Reddit? Hacker News? The Simpsons?
Clear Channel? Adbusters? 4chan/8chan?

Those are my guesses, I bet I got at least one right.

------
NN88
This is my favorite cold war story

------
andyl
Art as CIA weapon - sure. Cultural marxism as leftist weapon - still paying
dividends.

------
littletimmy
Well, then. Good to know America's intelligence agencies are doing the
important stuff. Yes, promoting dribbling on paper.

~~~
larsiusprime
Hey, it beats carpet bombing.

------
Mimick
As a neutral I see that Russia won the cold war by spending only on useful
things...

------
mladenkovacevic
This statement from the article strikes me as a bit of a stretch:

 _Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the
post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it
would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist
painting you are being duped by the CIA._

Perhaps not duped. But, how many other types of art were stifled by having a
secret fund devoted to creating, promoting and praising one type of art.

Which raises the question of why the CIA chose abstract expressionism as the
vehicle of choice for its propaganda. Perhaps because it is hard to be
subversive with a work of art that every observer will interpret differently.
Or perhaps because unlike other art that has some common ground for discourse
between two observers, abstract art is like watching clouds pass by. "I see a
baby!" one watcher will say. "I see a puppy!" another watcher will say. And
that's where the conversation ends. It's the ultimate expression of
individualism, but also the ultimate killer of dialogue.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's hard to make a point about political violence with a maroon rectangle.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yes and no. The maroon rectangle doesn't directly say anything. But Russian
Expressionism wasn't free to paint that maroon rectangle, so the maroon
rectangle could be a powerful statement of freedom.

In Park City, Utah, there is (or at least was) a gallery that sold Russian
Expressionist paintings. It had a painting in it that was controversial in
Russian art in the 1960s. It showed workers in a cloth factory, and it was
controversial because one of the workers had a wistful or dreamy expression on
her face. That expression nearly cost the painter his license as an artist.
That's how heavy-handed the USSR was toward art - you needed a license to be
an artist, and the government cared about the expressions on peoples' faces in
your paintings.

Another thing I saw in that gallery: There was a difference in the landscapes
done after 1990. They still are impressionist landscapes, but they have little
dots of bright color where there were flowers. Pre-1990, the landscapes looked
the same, but the overall impression was more drab. The freedom that came in
1991 showed up even in the landscapes, because the artists felt different.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Coming from Soviet Union yes it's very destructive that Socialist Realism was
the officially state-sponsored art movement.

But how is that different from what the CIA is doing here. If they really
wanted to be a patron of the arts and freedom of expression then why this
focus on a single art movement.

~~~
beat
Because the people in charge of the program at the CIA were fans of abstract
expressionism.

To put it another way, they were using tax dollars in a very weird way to
subsidize the kind of art they liked.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
It seems highly unlikely that this decision was made based on personal
artistic preferences of the CIA employees in charge of this program.

Like when the question came up "Hey which art movement are we going to prop up
with millions of dollars?" some head honcho said "I like abstract
expressionism.. make it so".

To put it another way, do you believe any decision at the CIA involving
millions of dollars is not made without hordes of analysts poring over every
available action and every possible outcome.

~~~
beat
They were thinking that abstract expressionism best represented the cultural
values that made the West superior to the communist world - the pure freedom
of thought and imagination required to produce abstract expressionism, and a
culture that could reward (or choose to not reward) its creators, without some
government censor getting involved to decide what is and is not valuable and
good. So it was an aesthetic love, but also a cultural love.

I totally grok where they're coming from. If you don't _love_ something,
you're not going to hold it up as a model of what makes your culture superior.
I love abstract expressionism and find megachurches creepy and weird, so I
would hold up abstract expressionism as a fine example of what makes America
great. Someone who loves megachurches and hates abstract expressionism would
do the opposite. (By way of measure, my favorite painting ever is Jackson
Pollack's "Mural", which I got to admire up close a lot when I was at the
University of Iowa)

So yes, those CIA directors who made that decision really, truly loved
abstract expressionism. They also found it the perfect antidote to the soul-
deadening rigidity of Socialist Realism. They felt socialist realism was the
result of a dying culture.

