Bill Knott’s post entitled “i told you so” consists of a single link, which leads to an article in The Independent that begins this way:
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.
Knott’s right, and we knew it; I touched on the issue myself a few years back.
Aside from the manipulations involved, we have to wonder how deeply and how widely the avant-garde was tainted, and whether it is still tainted. Not that the CIA would promote Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing in the hope of bringing China to its knees, but let’s be honest: the vitiation of the literary arts serves the moneyed elites as surely as the severing of visual art from its audience served them in the 1950s and ’60s. A people whose most cherished art form is the sitcom is unlikely to rebel, especially against the folks who churn out the sitcoms for them.
Am I the victim of creeping paranoia? Before you decide, read the article.
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And in a related story, check out Bob Arnold’s post here: “Keeping Students from the Polls”.
I second Conrad's thank-you to Lyle. More to read in 2012!<br /><br />And Ed, re: the CIA overlooking your stuff. Are you <i>sure</i>?
Thanks for the titles, Lyle! Especially the Berger.
"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. <br />It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks<br />labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this<br />and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it<br />that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, <br />though I think very
Some time back in my blog I wrote a little about CIA involvement in arts funding; basically, I gave a brief summary of the book <i>The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters</i> by Frances Stonor Saunders, which gives a highly detailed and footnoted account of CIA involvement in literary publishing in the U.S., among other things. My blog article is <a href="http://
Joseph,<br /><br />I rather love its delicious ambiguity & messiness: any cultural-technological 'transitioning' of the kind we're witnessing ( remember's McLuhan's take on the "camera oscura" in "Gutenberg's Galaxy"?)where Art plays directly or unwittingly into moneyed interests is bound to unravel (rather than consolidate) the million-and-one
Surely someone has studied the changing relationship between artist and audience since the late Middle Ages, but I just haven't run across it. It has always seemed to me that there is an oscillation: great art for everyday audiences, great art for tiny audiences, and back— Shakespeare to Pope to Browning to Eliot to…? All paralleled by the rise of global capitalism, its attendant media
Interesting stuff, Joseph!<br /><br />The suspicion that Goldsmith's defense of "creative plagiarism", for example, can be seen as playing into the hands of some Twitter/Facebook culture-engineering is all too likely. I'll even go one better and say the avant-garde (as in Silliman's recent Bury text festival neon "installation" & the spate of pseudo science-art