Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)

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Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)

neom

Comments (223)

tpurves
Literally 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.
ivan_gammel
Not 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).
coldtea
A 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.
gizajob
The 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
When 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.
FlyingBears
Art and cultural movements are a favorite vehicle for any country to serve its intelligence interests. An example is Goethe-Institut
MachineMan
Old 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.
mikert89
Far 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.
mauvehaus
Oh 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-ba...
dang
Related. Others?Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - 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 - June 2020 (7 comments)Also:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987770 (Feb 2025)Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587547 - Aug 2019 (33 comments)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 - Aug 2015 (133 comments)
rbbydotdev
Incredible to believe the CIA has more sway over artistic movements than actual artists.
ionwake
I’m sure there have been numerous articles about this over the years
Neil44
As usual it seems any headline ending in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
pir8life4me
Soft power - Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop.
lattice_epochs
Sounds like modern art was the kpop of its era.
attila-lendvai
splitting a canvas in two is a perfect "art form" that anyone can do to launder some millions into "honestly earned" money...
hn_submit
I had to laugh out loud when I read the title. Blaming everything on the CIA seems to be the raison du joure these days.
kittikitti
I 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.
WD-42
I 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.
tancop
The 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.
motohagiography
Before 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?"
keiferski
Pretty 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.
fithisux
Policies 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.
ChrisArchitect
(2020)Some previous discussion:2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204
paimapi
yet another case of an editor writing a clickbait headline for a much more nuanced article about a very specific and interesting topicit 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 isanother 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[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...
jongjong
I 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.
Eufrat
Sounds 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.
blini-kot
yesyes, it was
ButlerianJihad
Just gonna leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_the_Art...Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyoYour tax dollars, hard at work!
Barbing
And here I was thinking any psyop was necessarily bad.
claytonjy
Betteridge’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
ks2048
Is calling everything a Psy-Op a Psy-Op?
anon
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NordStreamYacht
More likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
anon
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senectus1
lol i think the CIA is nowhere near competent enough to even consider that idea.
colechristensen
“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.
nullbio
Who's behind the transgender psy-op? That's the one I really want to know.
thataccount
Colleges 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.