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Culture Critic@Culture_Crit

Reminder that modern art was a CIA psyop.

Former CIA officials came clean on this during the '90s, confirming that the agency used abstract art by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others to promote American culture during the Cold War.

The intent was to portray America as a bastion of intellectual and creative freedom. This was to rebut Soviet assertions that the U.S. was "culturally barren", and to contrast the cultural confinement of the Soviet empire, where artists had been restricted to painting Soviet realism since the 1930s.

Abstract Expressionism was seen as the most free and extreme form of artistic expression - the antithesis of Soviet rigidity. Modern art therefore became a weapon in the cultural war against communism.

Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA secretly funded a group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, through which it funnelled money to international art shows, literary magazines and operated dozens of offices around the globe - all with the explicit goal of promoting American Abstract Expressionism.

These efforts, coined operation "long leash", were meant to demonstrate to disaffected Soviets and European intellectuals that American painters were free to invent, and offend; unlike under tyranny, where "artists are made the slaves and tools of the state", as Eisenhower once said.

Paradoxically, at the time the works of Pollock and de Kooning were not even broadly popular with the American public, and earlier, more open attempts to promote new American art by the State Department had been widely mocked. Even President Truman famously said, 'If that's art, I'm a Hottentot'', when visiting an exhibit purchased by the DOS.

Because of this, and because it would have been impossible to attain support for such a project through Congress, the CIA's covert operation was necessary to push Abstract Expressionism in secret.



NOW YOU KNOW...

Explain Dali please.

I saw the movie... 'Hello Dali'.

Dali’s dreamlike surrealism is fantastically bizarre. Pollock’s work is boring and uninspiring to my eye. Makes sense now.

If I can do it, it’s not art. I can do that. If Hunter does it, Google buys that garbage and pays Hunter six figures as a thinly veiled payoff.

Fucking no-talent grifters. Anybody who pays one penny for any version of their "art" is a SUCKER.

Yeah, I can dribble paint everywhere. Often create fantastic messes.


Art is not my thing at all, modern art is the butt of jokes in all kind of entertainment.
Not sure I've ever seen it addressed seriously. However, I've never entered an art circle, or museum.





I never realized Roger did art, beyond one awesome tile jobs.
Or that his work was worth hundred$ of thou$and$.

Not surprised. Modern "art" is garbage.
Are you guys familiar with Laurel Canyon and the CIA involvement with music in the 60s. That ties in nicely with this thread.

One thing I'll say about Pollock's work: if you only ever see prints, or photographs, or see it on video, it is easy to dismiss it. I shared that view myself: Jack the Dripper.

If you actually go to see his works in person though you do gain a different appreciation of them. Of course, opinions may vary, but before writing him off you should try it.

I’ve seen a couple in person and they looked like degenerate garbage.

I’ve also had an art person try to “explain” his style to me and that struck me as retroactively devised woo woo to pass it all off as the product of some deep intellectual process.

*I happen to like Dali, Larson and Gaudí

Dang shame how Gaudí died

I'm not one for modern art but I like Pollock. Not sure why.

Not very cultured.

Can appreciate good photos.
Paintings that look like real life.


Maybe I'm too dumb to interpret a painting,
maybe needing to interpret a painting is BS?



Few things are as beautiful as the Master's paintings I see every
morning going to work. Late spring to late summer.

Jackson’s girl friend was a Gugegenhiem……….people bought them to be kool
He was not impressed
He used oil and latex or whatever he had
Many are falling apart today because of that.

He was not impressed with the social set. Walked out of a room at a party nude and pizzed in the fireplace

“See…….they don’t care”. Or something like that

My used toilet paper looks better than modern art.

Sexually, Salvador Dali had a floppy clock.

That would look good on a rifle stock.

Here I always thought that Modern Art was the Marxist deconstruction of real art.