Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
Comments
ivan_gammel
coldtea
Sure. But those making the claim are not talking about that.
They're talking about the post 50s abstract expressionism and pop art movements.
Just because it says "modern art" doesn't mean it refers to any and all modern art, much less 19th century art or say cubism or dada.
zombot
The art of arbitrarily redefining existing terms will never die out.
coldtea
It's the art of understanding terms have different meanings based on context and use, not one based on some definition handed down by the Gods that's applicable everywhere, that we should not let die out.
ivan_gammel
No, sorry, this is not the case. :) Not every popular idea has a free pass on this ground, especially not if it was created by a propaganda machine.
kakacik
Not its about using correct words with specific meanings instead of vague terms that at the end have incorrect claims, even you had to resort to that to get your point across.
'Humans are horrible', oh no I meant only that subset of 3 individuals, you should understand my context... thats weak excuse to be polite.
IAmBroom
Context in this case is derived by the arcane trick of RTFA.
huurtehoog
Cognition is naming thing and counting things.
Or as Aristotle would say, start with definitions.
I really do not get arguing about semantics. It is all arbitrary. You need to agree on what is meant to even intend on having a conversation.
mapt
This is a rich thing to say about the term "Modern", which is basically baked in with an expiration date.
inigyou
Modern C++ means C++ from 2011 btw
akhosravian
Actually some say “modern C++” dates to 19th century Europe. Ada Lovelace provided some of the earliest examples of undefined behavior that C++ programmers still love talking about to this day.
OroPla
I agree that it is incredibly stupid to call something from 1870 "modern". The word modern has a a clear meaning of "just now" / "contemporary". Not two hundred years ago.
It shouldn't be attached to anything that can age out of this meaning.
Garlef
The word has not only one but several clear meanings:
> In the context of art history, modernity (Fr. modernité) has a more limited sense, modern art covering the period of c. 1860–1970.
TheOtherHobbes
The more relevant term is Modernism, which was a wave of anti-realist abstraction in the arts and sciences.
It's more than a century old now.
"Modern art" in the 1950s/60s post-war sense means extreme abstraction with no realism at all.
Ironically abstraction can work in two directions - evocative messes like Pollock, or clean geometry and abstract functionalism in design and architecture.
The CIA liked the former in art because it was bold, challenging, abrasive, and individualistic. And the artists were drunks and addicts who were easy to own.
The other direction became domestic and corporate design.
OroPla
If it was clear we wouldn't be having this conversation.
coldtea
It is clear, and millions of people have been using it in the way the TFA uses it, just as historians of art has used other definitions.
What it is not is obvious to derive from first principles ("says modern, so much mean current") or stuck to a single definition ("but historians call any art after the middle ages Modern").
But it is still trivial to pick the context in either use, and trivial for someone to read at least 1 paragraph about the "CIA psy-op" claim, whether it's true or not, and figure what it means by modern art there (it doesn't mean Van Gogh or Monet). People just want to comment without bothering.
Garlef
I know.
But I was trying to reach the person who left the parent comment.
And hitting them with a phrasing that is directly poststructuralist seemed to be the wrong approach since they appear to operate in a structuralist framing.
IAmBroom
On HN we could have an argument about the definition of "is".
Clinton was just ahead of the curve.
Cordiali
Meanwhile historians are out there, regarding things from 500 years ago as modern.
brodo
Overall a great point, but I have a nit-pick:
> Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe
As someone who is active in the German art scene, the understanding is not that clear-cut. Modern art, as I learned it, is "art in the modern period". So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
The term used more often (at least in Germany) is "contemporary art". Which translates to "everything after WW 2". I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
NoboruWataya
I think this may be a translation issue, as I would always have understood "modern art" to refer to the movement that began in the 1860s, and (English) Wikipedia appears to back this up. Like others have said, "contemporary art" means art of the current time.
> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.
My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).
ivan_gammel
The 1860s as a starting decade is a popular conventional definition in English, in other languages "modern art" may be defined differently. But you are absolutely right, it makes more sense to call post-WW2 art the contemporary art or just postmodernism, because something that happened long before the birth of the half of the population of the planet isn't really "contemporary".
modo_mario
>Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles.
We drew vastly more art. The kind you describe was just more likely to be preserved as the institutions they were on about and the buildings they resided in persisted.
estearum
Surely people created a lot more art, but you're eliding the dynamic of professionalism. Art is ludicrously labor-intensive and so the vast majority of professional art (i.e. most art worth saving) would have been done for rich people.
modo_mario
I am indeed eliding the dynamic of professionalism. I don't think it has to be "ludicrously" labour intensive and I think "professional art" is overvalued and an absolute minority of all art ever created.
It just so happens that a lot of the modern/contemporary art talked about is mostly the domain of professional art (and examples that say otherwise are often not even thought of as such like hippy tie dye clothing.)
grey-area
No, Modern or Modernist art (with a capital m) is a specific period of art history. So yes it doesn’t tend to have museums but there are shows dedicated to Modern art.
Contemporary art always refers to art from the specific period the speaker is living in, ie our present moment.
KellyCriterion
- contemporary art -
Now I have to nitpick, too too :-)
According to my understanding on the usage of "contemporary art", this is a "time relative term", meaning it describes usually "what was usually/common around a given time/period"?
Antibabelic
What kind of art do you think the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), houses?
brodo
I've never been there, but the German Wikipedia says it houses "modern and contemporary art". I'd assume that in their vast collection, you might even find stuff that's older than the 1860s.
Antibabelic
The oldest works there are from the 1880s.
thefz
> So everything after the middle ages. Basically when people stopped only drawing religious art and portraits of nobles. What started in the 1860s is "modernism".
Ok, but you are reinforcing parent's point (which I agree with TBH).
brodo
Yes, I agree with the parent's point. I just wanted to point out that "modern art" is a little bit of a complicated term.
rdtsc
I think you might be reacting to the title only. The claim in the article is better phrased as “the Modern art was psy-op-ed by the US govt, especially through CIA”. They didn’t invent it, they may not even liked it personally. The very same artists making these paintings were not too far from being left leaning and sympathizing with regimes and ideas US government fought against. Nevertheless, it was still worth it, the sponsorship was seen as a counter to the Soviet art and culture. If anything a least as a “look you can even create these crazy paint splatters in a free society and nobody sends you to gulag” kind of angle.
ivan_gammel
Jain. If you leave only the facts, it becomes a bit boring, because everyone did that and continues doing so via various institutions. But the article pitches with the title and first paragraph a different story. And I doubt that e.g. Picasso was aware of the battle for his mind.
cyberjar
"the Default Country" is a good one. I'll have to start using that.
tryauuum
I think it a reference to "default city" from the russian internet, when people noticed that people from Moscow never specify the city when talking about topics which would normally require knowledge of which city are they residents of
Eventually it evolved, sometimes people say "hey, I'm from DC" or "hey, I live in DC2" (that means the second largest city, Saint-Petersburg)
ivan_gammel
Yes. Default Country for the world on many English-speaking forums is the same as Default City for Russia.
bmacho
Especially from someone whose "modern art" means mid-19th centuary European art under an article that starts with "In the mid-twentieth century".
jjgreen
For fun, ask a citizen of the Default Country where cars were invented ...
Waterluvian
At some point they discovered it was easier to just convince everyone they were exceptional than to actually be exceptional.
AlecSchueler
By "modern art" they mean things like abstract expressionism.
ivan_gammel
Reduction 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.
philipallstar
No, 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.
ivan_gammel
Most of the significant works of modern art were created before CIA was founded. The title is factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest. But "who cares" question points to something different: indeed, who cares if the knowledge acquired by the reader will be shallow and misleading? I do care. You may not. It's a matter of attitude. People are free to choose their chewing gum, right?
philipallstar
Yes, perhaps you're right. I think people think of "banana nailed to wall" as the outcome of modern art, and that I think is more recent. But there are works older than the CIA that look younger than it, such as Kandinski, and perhaps that is indeed misleading.
grey-area
That is not Modern art but an offshoot of it, like postmodern and pop art.
dgellow
Which is even more absurd
coldtea
Not really absurd. That scene nearly dominated the art scene in the post war / cold war period, and for layman casual uses (and even for several critic treatments), it was almost synonymous with modern fine art in general (not "modernist" art, modern, as in contemporary).
ivan_gammel
The only thing where "American" art scene dominated was the auction space. And significant part of it was imported from Europe (no tariffs applied) and continued to feed from there later. The rest of the world lived it's own life.
coldtea
It's not just about the "American art scene". Western European artists in the same "genre" also got funded in similar ways.
>The rest of the world lived it's own life.
Perhaps, but this is not about what happened in Mongolian or Indonesian art scenes, but mostly focused on the cold war theater of US and Western Europe.
ivan_gammel
First of all, what "genre"? I assume, abstract expressionism? Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time? Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
coldtea
>I assume, abstract expressionism?
Yes, abstract expressionism, but also other mostly US-led scenes like pop art to a degree.
>Second, why would anyone fund specifically abstract expressionism and for what purpose given the diversity of art movements of that time?
It had a US lead at the time, easier to explain US institutions promoting and do cross-continent exchanges and sponsorships, and conveniently apolitical compared to other art movements of the time.
>Third, what do you even know about contemporary art of Europe to make such bold claims?
Quite a lot, being from here, and familiar with both their history and the relevant literature.
A hardly a bold claim at all, it has been studied and reported in books such as "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press), "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War" (University of Chicago Press), "Pollock and After: The Critical Debate" (Harper Collins) and others, and of course the topic of TFA.
Your opposite claim would be the bold one.
ivan_gammel
So, on the question about your knowledge of European contemporary art you reply with the list of books about American art history, written and published in USA for American reader. Ok.
coldtea
We're discussing the role of CIA, an American organization, in the Cold War era promotion of abstract expressionism ("modern art"). The books cover that, and have references to both the US and European side, artists and institutions.
The first book, which is also the canonical one on the subject, is not "written and published in USA for American reader". It's a book by a British historian, first published in the late 90s in Britain, then republished in the US (and all over Europe, there's German, French, Spanish etc versions).
The second book explicitly concerns the transition of power in the art scene and the interplay between Europe and the US in the same cold war period.
The third is broken in different essays, including one explicitly on "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War", and how it was used internationally.
All three are academic books, not some fringe conspiracy theories.
And these books, and others, have been translated, read, and discussed in Europe. I've read them, and hundred more on European 20th century art, which is besides the point, as most of the others are off topic, we're not discussing say Dada or Cubism or Arte Povera here, but something specific.
Anything to contribute besides being ad-hominem, wrong, and rude?
boredumb
Let's hear what non-default country invented pop-art in the 50s.
ivan_gammel
The one with the young Queen, which also invented English language…
bluegatty
And Xerox invented the GUI but who cares?
'Mid 20th century' is when the explosion of mass media happened, and these concepts were globalized.
It's worth studying for sure, and frankly, it seems the CIA came to a reasonable conclusion. The backed art for literally the right reasons. Good on them.
rafram
You clearly didn't even click through to the article, and neither did most of the people arguing with you.
Tangurena2
Both Hitler and Stalin only respected/allowed representational art. They both hated abstract art. Any promotion of non-representational art was in effect a rejection of Stalin (and Mao and Kim).
Socialist Realism was the name for the representational art promoted by Stalin, Mao & Kim. It was always a propaganda piece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/socialist-realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_Germany
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art
If there was anything that Default Country did better than Commieland, the CIA would promote it. Art? Sure. Why not, some people like that stuff.
Thanks for the new term.
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.
scarecrowbob
I wish those actions made the folks doing that "better" instead of implicating beautiful parts of my childhood in their vicious attempts to keep the entire world under their thumb...
The obvious problem is that when the same group is committing vicious crimes and horrors, it's very hard to look at about anything they do and be like... well, at least folks were getting laid during Midnight Climax.
"Oh, hey, that's cute: the vicious monsters who torture people to death in a global network of black sites are manipulating us again by exporting pleasant videos of puppets teaching children".
foolinaround
what 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
foolinaround
wow, 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...
Gud
They invented what is called "Thai food" for the export market, to bring in tourists.
empath75
The only reason the CIA did it in secret is that congress _hated_ modern art and killed State Department projects supporting it. The soviets and every other government also promoted their own artists abroad extensively. Not everything the CIA did was a psy-op, sometimes it was a convenient way for the executive branch to do something that congress didn't want to pay for.
lo_zamoyski
> what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world
Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.
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
Art became an investment and artistic properties ceased to matter.
gizajob
The 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
This 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
"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).
gizajob
I didn’t say complete abandonment. You’re imagining what I’m imagining.
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.
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.
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.
mondrian
Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were Europeans, and Europe is where art speculation and the "Art Market" was born, and where Art History became equated with Art Market History. Americans showed up with a 20 year lag and kept lagging, with e.g. Pollock imitating Picasso in the 1940s. By then, globally-viral-Picasso was selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of inflation adjusted dollars.
gizajob
Yours is a good take but the duct taping of the banana was done by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
modo_mario
Maybe 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.
MachineMan
I 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.
CGMthrowaway
>It self-propagates
Part of the design spec of the psyop, perhaps
jonnybgood
Most of greatest works of modern art are European. The term “modern art” is in reference to an era that we are no longer in.
You have a strong opinion. I would highly implore you to learn more about art history and why art is the way it is today. You’ll learn why banana and duct tape is why it is.
What makes an art work museum worthy? It’s very rewarding to have that insight.
modo_mario
I feel like a good number of people have gotten fatigue from the share of mindspace given to art that is deemed valuable due to some art history, that you maybe even can only get if you have knowledge of art history or read the plague attributing the "clever" meaning.
Not everyone gives about the class signaling that brings or the like or the insight that makes one say 'oooh i get it now' or how avant garde in a slightly new way the next pollock is. I think it's fitting how someone else compared it to the declinging returns of bitcoin mining. After Duchamp's Fountain, Cattelan's Comedian, Warhol's campbell cans,...what share still give a shit about definitional art or other similarly iterated on styles? Maybe you can make a piece about it.
CGMthrowaway
>Most of greatest works of modern art are European
Convincing post-war europe that they are outside the influence of the US was also a great psyop
phainopepla2
The "banana taped to a wall" tendency in art began in Europe, with Dadaism. But I think you're half right, in that it was a clear reaction to the destruction of Europe (by itself, in the first World War).
polnoner
This is nonsense.
Modern art is modern art because by the early 20th century, it was hard to do anything original in something resembling a traditional style.
It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music.
Arnold Schoenberg wasn't a psyop. If anything it is a comment on the lack of modern cultural sophistication and the way people relate to the world in terms of sensationalist narrative for click optimization.
CGMthrowaway
> It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music
I don't see ANY dearth of originality in American 12-tone music during the cold war. What are you meaning by this?
trgn
you're agreeing, just harping on slight different (and all valid) uses of the words.
wewxjfq
A banana taped to the wall is a deeper and more profound art commentary than yours.
anal_reactor
Agree. I felt like I wasn't interested in art. I just didn't like it. Turns out, it's not a "me" problem, it's an "art" problem. Once I got involved in the furry community I discovered how beautiful art can be. My whole house is full of furry artworks, and I'm commissioning more. Those artists create things that are fun, novel, original. As opposed to "abstract New York no. 41715".
But the deeper problem is that an average consumer simply doesn't care about quality. Look at how most people listen to the music - random radio with same 10 pop songs over and over again with ads in-between, while being stuck in traffic. They're not experiencing music, they just want something to fill the void and that's it.
rebolek
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I would prefer "abstract New York no. 41715" to anything remotely connected to furries.
And that's fine, people have different tastes, there's nothing wrong with it.
pringk02
Out of curiosity, can you link to a publicly available furry work to help someone curious get into it? And help to know what to look for to appreciate it.
anal_reactor
It really depends on your taste. If you want to be up to date with the latest stuff, then browse profiles on bsky or Twitter. furaffinity.net is a bit old school, but still active. e621.net is where you can find lots and lots of stuff and there are tags, but I rarely actually browse it.
My first experience with furry was a Tumblr blog of a guy who reposted art he liked and had exactly the same taste as me. Tumblr is a dead wasteland now though.
You'll have to browse through a lot of trash, but once you get a decent list of artists you like, your experience will improve dramatically.
Sounds a little vulgar, but IMO you should start with things you find sexy because you'll enjoy it even if the quality isn't there. Once you get a foot in the door, you'll be able to look for decent art that isn't porn.
Also, artists tend to be overworked and overly sensitive, which creates a lot of drama. Just ignore that.
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.
pkul
I 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.
zmgsabst
Is 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
>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
notarobot123
I assume by "orchestrated" you mean intended by the people involved in making them happen. Humans act in the world. Some people have power and influence that they bring to bear on their activities and desired outcomes. It's true.
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
mikert89
I meant orchestrated in a subversive way
Tangurena2
I think the first time that was brought to my attention was one of our host's essays: The Submarine.
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...
wincy
Thanks 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
Maybe that is why realism is chased so much in video games in the west, while eastern countries rarely are interested.
FlyingBears
Art and cultural movements are a favorite vehicle for any country to serve its intelligence interests. An example is Goethe-Institut
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)
jychang
Man, 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
Incredible to believe the CIA has more sway over artistic movements than actual artists.
onion2k
Wealthy patronage has always steered art, and the CIA has a lot of money.
dreambuffer
The CIA hires "actual" artists, all the time and in great numbers. They have a creative writing division.
Tangurena2
If 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
More 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
And the CIA actually had rather good taste
u8080
Or they do bend public opinion on what "good taste" is
afpx
Wait 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.
inigyou
Are you referring to the way they always have to portray the American army as the heroic winners of every war?
afpx
Yes!
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.
TeMPOraL
True 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
K-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.
riffruff24
and dont forget the pandas
pir8life4me
Chinese pandas, the reward for friends. Not friends? No pandas for you!
alfor
What 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.
lattice_epochs
Sounds like modern art was the kpop of its era.
analog31
Oddly enough kpop is the result of American music taking over the world.
Tangurena2
I 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.
BLKNSLVR
Soon to overtaken by nkpop if I'm reading the room accurately.
attila-lendvai
splitting a canvas in two is a perfect "art form" that anyone can do to launder some millions into "honestly earned" money...
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.
trgn
i wonder about this too.
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
WD-42
That is an interesting thought. To me I think I think my brain is being re wired to appreciate effort. Not saying there isn’t modern art that doesn’t take effort. But paintings from the masters is a good place to start.
rramon
Kinda paradox because AI seems better at replicating complex classic paintings and realism than rather simple modern parametric imagery.
WD-42
It’s not about what ai can or can’t do. It’s a new appreciation for both artistry AND skill.
lmf4lol
until you begin to really LOOK at it
rramon
Yeah, flaws hide within the complexity, with simple stuff it's more obvious.
tavavex
Fun 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.
Tangurena2
And the hillside on Windows XP is also a photo.
tacitusarc
I feel like a picture of rolling hills with spring wheat and a blue sky wouldn’t go amiss
WD-42
They should bring it back
kakacik
> I just can’t do abstract cubes anymore
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
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.
hahamaster
"raison du joure these days"
I had to laugh out loud too when I read this.
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.
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.
vlovich123
Did 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
Yes, 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
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".
vlovich123
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
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.
indy
"Coffee break is over, stop thinking and get back to work."
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.
jackb4040
> 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
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
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?"
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.
paimapi
yet 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
[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17563812M/How_nonviolence_pr...
blini-kot
yes
yes, 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=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo
Your tax dollars, hard at work!
moron4hire
Holy shit that track rips. Thanks!
Barbing
And here I was thinking any psyop was necessarily bad.
dgellow
Yeah, if that’s true we should get those people their own agency and let them manage museums
colechristensen
The 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
I 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
> 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.
electricboots
I think we can work together and provide ourselves freedom/collective agency/ some amount of say in the order of things
ninalanyon
So where should one look?
It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.
left-struck
How would that be manipulative?
derektank
I wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.
telotortium
Hence why USAID was (allegedly) co-opted to perform the same role.
The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.
gigatree
Are you saying modern art is positive?
math-man
Do you not appreciate art?
NordStreamYacht
evanjrowley
That's postmodern art, not modern art.
NordStreamYacht
So that's a post-banana?
innis226
Okay, 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
Modern art is weird.
evanjrowley
That's postmodern art, not modern art.
soulofmischief
I 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
Andy Warhol - also a postmodernist
al_borland
Should 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.
bigstrat2003
I 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
This could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.
refactor_master
1850? 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".
karmakurtisaani
Indeed, 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.
nine_k
Indeed. 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.
dgellow
« Too many notes, your majesty »
wredcoll
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
neuroticnews25
There is nothing to understand, bunch of jerks signaling sophistication or laundering money while poisoning the soul of men.
dgellow
The conflation of art with the art market is a good litmus test…
neuroticnews25
The art that sucks but sells is arguably more excusable then the art that just sucks.
Scrapemist
Contemporary art is the mirror of our time.
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
godelski
Exactly, it is a weird title. Modern art is as much of a "psy-op" as:
- grocery stores
- NASA
- rock music
- psychedelics and hippies
- a strong middle class
- affordable vehicles and the highway system
- Hollywood movies
- Books
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
zhivota
The 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
But 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
> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us?
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
altmanaltman
No, 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...
British Invasion was not a state thing.
ks2048
Is calling everything a Psy-Op a Psy-Op?
dgellow
Actually yes
t0rt01se
Is calling that which calls everything a psy-op a psy-op also a psy-op?
NordStreamYacht
More likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
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.
sublinear
Eventually, 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
"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
i 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.
rcxdude
This is just another 'people should just agree with me' that operates on a meta-level.
sublinear
I'm not saying "agree to disagree". The question of agreement implies the awareness of a conflict at all.
I'm saying that every time we have new media there are opportunists bugging everyone else that normally wouldn't care. Time and energy are precious. Humanity's default state is, and should be, ignorance and apathy.
If those last two words boil your blood, you gotta take a look at the mirror and reconsider why. You don't have to reply. You don't even have to remember anything I'm writing here. Just let go and be free. That doesn't have to mean you agreed/disagreed with me. You can in fact put the genie back in the bottle by completely abandoning it.
whoareyouthen
I don't think it was genuine then as well, just a slogan for "fighting the communists".
You lie today, you lied then.
Same with "let my people go" for the Soviet jews, it was more about draining the "human capital" from USSR.
nullbio
Who's behind the transgender psy-op? That's the one I really want to know.
Tangurena2
> 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.
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.
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).