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For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art — President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex-communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:11AM
The article says the CIA sponsored jazz, opera, and classical musicians. I have to wonder whether they were also behind rock-and-roll "music", the reason the world hates America.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:38AM
No, rock and roll began with black people, and the Yale- and Harvard-educated elite of the CIA had nothing to do with black people.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday November 01 2015, @01:26PM
Rock and roll was a combination of multiple genres of music. It wasn't a black invention. Early on it was relatively common for a song to be charted for country, rock and blues in the same week from the same album. You can't ascribe it to one racial group or another without overlooking essential contributions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @12:07AM
I've been taken seriously yet again! I wonder whether this was the same AC who had posted, two minutes earlier, about Poe's Law.