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.
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.
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.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time.
There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
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.
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.
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.
They 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.
They're literally like "there's not really any evidence of this" in a thread about the millionth piece of evidence of this. And since it's the Paris Review doing a limited hangout about the Paris Review (the minor detail that the co-founder was a CIA agent), it somehow ends up admiring him for his love of nature.
The shame is how easy it is to do this now, not that it has been done for a century. Western elites have gotten so stupid and authoritarian that you don't even need to hide the seams anymore, you can joke about them and ban people who don't laugh.
edit: also notable about the Paris Review itself is that nobody reads it, most of what was published in it at its peak was horrible and turned out to be completely ephemeral. You won't have ever heard of most of the writers in it, who went on to university appointments (or never left them.) It was a tool for providing an income to particular writers and justifications for other initiatives; a thinktank. Comic books had more staying power.
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.
> Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,
As a consequence a lot of such activities were instead moved over to special operations forces, as detailed by Seth Harp in his recent book The Fort Bragg Cartel.
"Proprietaries" are also known as "cutouts", and the CIA uses those extensively in order to do things they really aren't allowed to do and to provide plausible deniability. Mike Benz [0] is a good introduction to how the CIA (and, by extension, the state department and Pentagon) work.
I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.
> "He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization"
Seems part of the deal for these kinds of job?
> "In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records."
The reciprocal part of the deal.
The 'old boys network' recruitment as we call it in the UK fits the pattern. I suppose that there was a desire to have eyes and ears among the new elite peer group.
I imagine that the Agency was compartmentalised so a cultural adjutant in Paris would not necessarily know about activities in Iran.
(The Snow Leopard remains a favourite book of mine).
"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies."
This is actually a bit of a tell, because the best way to make ideology palatable is to make it seem like common sense (which is easy if that ideology is already in power). As zizek said, it is when you believe you have stepped outside ideology that you are most fully ensnared by it.
A lot of people think, "I am not ideological, I just use common sense, I am apolitical." Sorry but this is a game you must play whether you want to or not- trying to avoid making a choice is still making a choice.
Its like with fashion, for example- you may think that by wearing khaki shorts and sandals with socks that you are avoiding making fashion choices, but what is actually happening is that you are simply making very bad fashion choices.
I rather think that one of the psychological principles beneath authoritarianism is that making choices requires effort, and so people try to avoid it, and the easiest way to do that is by copying whatever everyone else is doing. When a person in this mode sees other people doing things that are different or unusual or out of place, they are reminded that in fact they have free will, and that other choices were always possible, and that is a disturbing and uncomfortable thought.
Whoa! I knew that CIA funded Abstract Expressionist Art (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_...). However, involvement in Paris Review boggles my mind because, I love that magazine.
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
It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.
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.
...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
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.
>to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history
Except stuff like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by design and not by randomness.
This is just high brow conspiracist stuff.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time.
There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
>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!
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.
Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.
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:_T...
<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.
They 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.
If 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.
They're literally like "there's not really any evidence of this" in a thread about the millionth piece of evidence of this. And since it's the Paris Review doing a limited hangout about the Paris Review (the minor detail that the co-founder was a CIA agent), it somehow ends up admiring him for his love of nature.
The shame is how easy it is to do this now, not that it has been done for a century. Western elites have gotten so stupid and authoritarian that you don't even need to hide the seams anymore, you can joke about them and ban people who don't laugh.
edit: also notable about the Paris Review itself is that nobody reads it, most of what was published in it at its peak was horrible and turned out to be completely ephemeral. You won't have ever heard of most of the writers in it, who went on to university appointments (or never left them.) It was a tool for providing an income to particular writers and justifications for other initiatives; a thinktank. Comic books had more staying power.
> 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.
You are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
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
On the relationship of CIA and the media there is always the 1977 classic https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-...
An interesting tidbit I found, somewhat related:
> Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,
The Church Committee also produced interesting documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#External_link...
As a consequence a lot of such activities were instead moved over to special operations forces, as detailed by Seth Harp in his recent book The Fort Bragg Cartel.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bra...
Seconding the recommendation of Harp's book, it's excellent.
this is a fantastic book. immediately what i thought about the instant you mentioned the church committee.
"Proprietaries" are also known as "cutouts", and the CIA uses those extensively in order to do things they really aren't allowed to do and to provide plausible deniability. Mike Benz [0] is a good introduction to how the CIA (and, by extension, the state department and Pentagon) work.
I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.
[0] https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber
Any source on CIA's old involvement in India's press?
They absolutely didn't have their finger on the pulse in 1998 ...
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
They grilled some Australian bush pilots no end over that, wanting to know how they knew what the CIA didn't.
Two quotes from OA
> "He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization"
Seems part of the deal for these kinds of job?
> "In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t declassify personnel records."
The reciprocal part of the deal.
The 'old boys network' recruitment as we call it in the UK fits the pattern. I suppose that there was a desire to have eyes and ears among the new elite peer group.
I imagine that the Agency was compartmentalised so a cultural adjutant in Paris would not necessarily know about activities in Iran.
(The Snow Leopard remains a favourite book of mine).
"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies."
This is actually a bit of a tell, because the best way to make ideology palatable is to make it seem like common sense (which is easy if that ideology is already in power). As zizek said, it is when you believe you have stepped outside ideology that you are most fully ensnared by it.
A lot of people think, "I am not ideological, I just use common sense, I am apolitical." Sorry but this is a game you must play whether you want to or not- trying to avoid making a choice is still making a choice.
Its like with fashion, for example- you may think that by wearing khaki shorts and sandals with socks that you are avoiding making fashion choices, but what is actually happening is that you are simply making very bad fashion choices.
I rather think that one of the psychological principles beneath authoritarianism is that making choices requires effort, and so people try to avoid it, and the easiest way to do that is by copying whatever everyone else is doing. When a person in this mode sees other people doing things that are different or unusual or out of place, they are reminded that in fact they have free will, and that other choices were always possible, and that is a disturbing and uncomfortable thought.