So.... abstract expressionism was funded and pushed by the CIA, under a shell company CCF, thru grants to the MoMa : art

[-] quarrk@hexbear.net 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This was contemporaneous with CIA pushing postmodern philosophy and all the subjectivist navel-gazing which that entails.

Anticommunist counter-cultures have the distinguishing character of being anti-systematization, anti-objectivity, and anti-intellectual. Unlike science which refutes appearances for inner truths, this way of thinking refutes inner truths and elevates the immediate impression. You aren’t allowed to elaborate a philosophy, you can’t systematize based on a collection of facts. Every fact has an isolated existence from which extrapolation is invalid.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago

There's bad pomo, but I don't think it's good to paint it with such a broad brush as all being bad.

[-] quarrk@hexbear.net 11 points 1 day ago

Postmodern is a famously nebulous term anyway, so I admit I went on a bit of a rant peterson-red that can’t be refuted without more specificity (i.e. particular thinkers) and I’m not really prepared to argue my point in detail.

I tend to agree with how Rockhill describes it the CIA’s backing of various postmodern thinkers: it is more about giving extra influence to ideas that otherwise don’t have the same organic influence. It doesn’t mean every thing about what they thought is untrue or not worth considering. But it is still true that the CIA picked these ideas for a reason, the purpose of undermining the systematic and scientific approach of Marxism, which cannot be beat on its own terms.

I would connect the subjectivist tendency also to the subjective theories of value associated with the Austrian school of economics, which essentially started the neoclassical economics paradigm that is still taught in many western universities today. To them, the value of a product of labor is not objective and has only an ephemeral existence. It is no coincidence that these theories kicked off in the 1890s, less than a decade after Marx’s death. Marxism is very difficult to beat head-on.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

I certainly would also agree with you that there is a malignant, anti-real, anti-science bent to Austrian school accounts of value for that reason (and also praxeology, don't forget praxeology).

But I guess my thing is that a lot of postmodernism philosophy is not about attacking objectivity or anything like that, but commenting on how western society historically and especially in modernity has oriented itself in an idealized way that is (deliberately?) unmoored from material causality. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Baudrillard's Four Stages of Simulacra, describing just that process of social unmooring (Baudrillard said that he wasn't a postmodernist, but Sartre said that he wasn't an existentialist (and Marx said that he wasn't a Marxist /j)), which reminds me a great deal of Debord's idea of the Spectacle. Derrida, to pick another example, did of course criticize people overestimating their direct access to the truth, but his response to that wasn't to throw his hands in the air and say it's all subjective, but to try to pioneer a process in literary analysis for understanding what a work really means ("deconstruction"). I don't remember if it was Marx or Engels (normally I'd guess Engels but I have the vague memory it was Marx), but one of them said that if objective truth was readily apparent to the senses, there would be no need for science, somewhat echoing arguments from people like Hume about how we cannot observe causality, only correlation, and so we need to base scientific models on inductive reasoning.

And of course, some of the point of arguments made by postmodernists like Deleuze are that these sorts of distortions are sometimes older than writing, as in his criticisms of "representational thinking" as an idealist distortion preventing us from understanding what something is by only thinking about it as an exemplar of an abstract ideal, rather than taking it for what it is and how it may extend past the potentials of the aforementioned exemplar that we might otherwise judge as strictly superior to it.

Obviously we can also rattle off criticisms for any of the thinkers listed, Marxists included, but my point is not that they are all shining beacons but that they have serious and worthwhile things to discuss.

I promise you that I have just as much contempt for anti-reality thinking as you seem to, and it is both a real problem and something present in what gets called postmodernism, but I can say that there's a lot more in "postmodernism" than just that, and I have only the most glancing familiarity with the tradition.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 39 points 1 day ago

The Socialist Realism policies were a strategic mistake that made enemies without much benefit, so by encouraging art movements wildly contrary to Socialist Realism, they could turn people against it because this perfectly fine art movement wasn't allowed and perhaps even art that they like or would like to make was considered improper. That's my interpretation of it, anyway.

Obviously encouraging Socialist Realism was a good thing, but discouraging other genres was counterproductive.

[-] PKMKII@hexbear.net 27 points 1 day ago

My theory is, the US in the early Cold War was still figuring out the soft power, cultural spread of ideology thing in the context of the new, dual superpower world order. So there was a, throw shit against the wall and see what sticks approach. The covert support of abstract expressionism was one of them; there was a similar program with creative literature. Abstract Expressionism probably looked like a viable candidate as it was new, had a flair of the intellectual to appeal to the cultural elite, position American creatives as breaking ground the stodgy, old fashioned Europeans weren’t touching.

That being said, I don’t think that the CIA wholesale invented abstract expressionism, nor that the artists themselves thought of their work as, directly or indirectly, propaganda pieces for the CIA. It was just The Man leveraging the hot new thing of the moment.

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah the book I was reading said the artists did not necessarily know they were being used for propaganda. Some of them were nominally anti-gov, too. But outside of direct interviews which may not exist, I don't know if we can know for sure. Funny lil coinky dink, really gets my noggin jogging, Pollock was killed in a car crash. Not exactly a strange death in the US, but shrug-outta-hecks

E: I read he was visiting Europe when he died. Trying not to be too conspiracy brained. Just thought it was worth mentioning

[-] PKMKII@hexbear.net 11 points 1 day ago

There are some figures in the abstract expressionism movement that were questioned about it. They said the artists had no knowledge, but then again if I were a CIA op that’s exactly what I would say.

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Oh yeah also, immediately after his death the Met museum "acquired" all of his remaining works

[-] mayakovsky@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago

Many of the ab-ex artists were far more ideologically aligned with capitalism than other artists had been in the past or even other artists of that time. They were big fans of Ayn Rand for example. (Smh, I love Joan Mitchell's paintings, but she was a fucking Randian freak.)

It wasn't just the abstract expressionists either, but also hard edge, color field and other abstract painters. Many of these artists in particular were greatly influenced by work that centered the Soviet avant-garde artists of the 10-20s. But there is a significant difference between Lissitsky's Red Wedge and what American abstraction was about later on. So the other end of this is the American appropriation of what was very politically motivated art (even outside of a socialist bend, it was art that was antagonistic to the old orders) into decoration.

The CIA didn't create these people, but it was seen as ideologically convenient to support them. Even if the CIA didn't dump money into it, the art would still have been made, exhibited and sold. Maybe less of it, but it was a convenient money sink for the wealthy. It was work which not only didn't threaten them as a class, but pandered to their taste and self image.

[-] D61@hexbear.net 20 points 1 day ago

But why?

With nearly infinite money and a remit to "do anything" to fight communism. There's no reason not to.

Heck, there's a whole genre of books/podcasts about all the wacky shit the CIA got up to what with their gay bombs and cats with radio transmitters implanted in their heads and LSD mind control and remote sensing.

[-] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 9 points 1 day ago

the "gay bomb" in particular was a proposal somebody submitted and supposedly didn't go anywhere

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

I'm operating from the assumption that enemies of the Soviet union were competent, educated professionals. I know we have a lot of failsons and daughters nowadays, but I think (with absolutely nothing to back this up, please prove me wrong) that anti communists used to do more than spread bad vibes. There was concerted real effort to change culture and "common sense".

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

That is true, but the kind of culture war that they were waging is one that lacked successful precedent, so it makes sense to experiment with things that you are pretty sure won't backfire just to see if they end up being effective.

[-] juniper@hexbear.net 28 points 1 day ago

I'm blanking on who I got this take from, but essentially abstract expressionism is a blank canvas. It's ideologically vacuous and leaves interpretation up to the alienated, atomized viewer. So not necessarily about artistic freedom but instead that the emptiness is the point. Plus also I think the general milieu of NY artists at that time was pretty anti-communist so funding inscrutable art had the byproduct of encouraging a "counterculture" that wasn't actually counter to anything of substance. Unfortunately I don't have sources for this and welcome other commenters if they may know where I got these vibes from.

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago

NY artists at that time was pretty anti-communist

Literally opposite of the truth. Mid-20th century NY artists and intellectuals were communists. Not necessarily pro-USSR, many Trots and anarchists, but certainly not anti-communist liberals. Many of them were harassed during the McCarthyist era.

a "counterculture" that wasn't actually counter to anything of substance.

Abstract Expressionism is partly, and very deliberately went against the capitalist realism of the 40s and 50s. Think about how the current alt-right slobbers over the nuclear family 50s style coca cola ads? Well, Abstract Expressionism is purposely against that kind of representative art. Simply countering it with the same style but with strong steelworkers instead of happy housewives would have been a weak response. They wanted a radical change.

Then the so-called counterculture definitely went against US conservative lifestyle in many ways, but they also actively organized against the Vietnam War and so on.

Now we can talk about how that strand of leftism was "misguided", infantile disorder etc., but thinking that Modern art and later the counterculture was some kind of CIA plot to divert the masses is just a ludicrous oversimplification.

Yeah they failed to bring revolution to the US. But what the hell are current Amerikkkans doing?

[-] juniper@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago

Literally opposite of the truth. Mid-20th century NY artists and intellectuals were communists.

Art history isn't my area but I'm gonna need a citation on which NY abstract expressions were communists. Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning... none of these people are communists. Probably my fault for not being specific when I used "milieu."

Abstract Expressionism is partly, and very deliberately went against the capitalist realism of the 40s and 50s.

Do you have a source for this claim? Not trying to start a flame war but I'm hesitant to believe this based on my discussions with art nerds over the years. My guess is you're confusing it with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

I'm gonna need a citation

Kinda funny you make a broad vibes based comment, but it sounds like you demand sources from me.

First of all, you didn't mention any names. The NY art and intellectual millieu was heavily left leaning.
Second, yes, many of them were anarchists like Newman or Rothko, Pollock participated in the Siqueiros Workshop, unless you think that doesn't count, only CPUSA card carrying commies count,
thirdly it's not just them, but the influential critics too like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro too? Or John Berger? "emptiness is the point?" Was it all psyop? I've seen this hot take before, but it's just bad art history dressed up as Marxism. It isn't serious. Actually engage with it.

I'm not saying all mentioned critics were perfect commies, but don't flatten their contribution. They were interpreting their contemporaries.

leaves interpretation up to the alienated, atomized viewer.

(Free interpretation as opposed to what? Revolutionary message in an envelope? Wouldn't free interpretation be the opposite of easy consumerism? The critics I mentioned argued about this a lot. But they did appreciate the art itself.)

We can argue that the anti-Stalinist leftists like Schapiro were misguided in their politics, but then we are veering to a different topic. Or the commodification of dissent, like seeing Abstract art in IKEA, is, again, I believe is a different topic.

Sorry for being polemic, but I'm seeing vulgar Marxist hot takes upbeared in this thread left and right. It's silly.

This is what grinds my gears:

encouraging a "counterculture" that wasn't actually counter to anything of substance.

Abstract Expressionism definitely went against capitalist Kitsch (There's a famous essay by Clement Greenberg, originally published in the CPUSA affiliated Partisan Review) Nazis still hate Abstract art. Wonder why.

My guess is you're confusing it with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism

I am not confusing anything. The commercial art of the era on the billboards and the magazines was the dominant visual code they've rebelled against. (Greenberg called it Kitsch.) Newman doesn't need to say literally that "I'm rebelling against the A&P ad I've seen in The Atlantic", that's just silly.

Again sorry for being combative, nothing personal, but I truly hate the "postwar modern art is a CIA psyop" take. It's fash adjacent vulgar Marxism.

[-] juniper@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

I can look past your irritating and self-righteous tone. Thank you for the information.

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

I've never come across the term "vulgar Marxism" before. Are you saying the takes in this post lack rigour? From a quick search I read that vulgar Marxists are those that believe in the separation of Marxism from philosophical thought and that Marxism-Leninism is Lenin's response to that. Is that an accurate assessment? I am gonna have to do a lot of reading

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

Vulgar Marxism is thinking there's a crude one way direct causal relationship between base and superstructure. i. e. in a capitalist society, workers are atomized psychologically, and artists working in this society make art promoting this kind of atomistic individualism (or whatever)

I also include this more recent wave of thinking, "Well, the CIA/NED helped XY financially, therefore their values perfectly aligned with the US State Department"

The truth is much more nuanced. This was one of the big topics of 20th century Marxism. You can choose randomly (Benjamin, Gramsci, WIlliams et al) and they will touch on this.

here's a pdf of Raymond Williams's Base and Superstructure

[-] rufuscrispo@hexbear.net 17 points 1 day ago

there was a parallel movement in creative writing as well. workshops of empire by eric bennett lays out how anti-collectivist (that is, anti-communist) aesthetics became core to the foundations of university mfa programs and the "workshop" model, popularized at the university of iowa program and copied elsewhere. the aesthetic priorities were to center individualist "unknowability" and examination, which re-affirms capitalists' need for people to be atomized units. for the most part, but not completely, this task was undertaken sincerely by those running the programs, since they saw themselves and all "true" artists as impossibly deep reservoirs of emotional integrity beyond the limits of the enslaved soviet mind.

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This one is also a favourite myth of the new new vulgar Marxist left:

the aesthetic priorities [at the Iowa Workshop] were to center individualist "unknowability" and examination, which re-affirms capitalists' need for people to be atomized units.

You are talking about people like Vonnegut and Carver here. May not fit Zhdanovite criteria of good fiction, but come on. Ridiculously philistine take.

[-] rufuscrispo@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

far from it. again, no one is saying that rothko or carver or the majority of us cold war era artists were willing propagandists, but the structural support for their work was part of a larger project to "professionalize" artists -- plugging them into various awards, foundations, grants, and universities -- so that only acceptable "transgressions" against bourgeois norms could be maintained and fostered. it's a system that exists even now. i really don't see how it's that controversial a take.

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

far from it. again, no one is saying that rothko or carver or the majority of us cold war era artists were willing propagandists, but the structural support for their work was part of a larger project to "professionalize" artists -- plugging them into various awards, foundations, grants, and universities -- so that only acceptable "transgressions" against bourgeois norms could be maintained and fostered. it's a system that exists even now. i really don't see how it's that controversial a take.

yeah sure sure, but you see this above is a much more general and nebulous claim than

the aesthetic priorities [at the Iowa Workshop] were to center individualist "unknowability" and examination, which re-affirms capitalists' need for people to be atomized units.

This is just vulgar Marxism

Remember that Marx admired Balzac...

Funnily enough between my first comment and this one, I was reading a book, and this page specifically, funny coincidence:

We have seen that in proper structuralist procedure, the economic determinism professed by Marxism is unacceptable, since it affirms a direct causal link between the content of the discourse and the reality of its enunciation, neglecting the specific role of the code. Take any novel; for orthodox Marxism it will reproduce either the ideology of the ruling class or that of the oppressed class. For structuralism such a view is premature, to say the least, for the novel originates primarily in the code of novelistic discourse, and not in the author's social awareness. It is only secondarily as the analysis progresses, a structural correspondence may perhaps be established between the novelistic code as a whole (but not this or that particular novel) and the relation of subordination which, of all the relations possible in one group's power over another, defines the rule of the bourgeoisie. Should this hypothesis of a relation between novelistic code and bourgeois domination be verified, then the 'progressive' novels would not be those whose content refers to the experiences of the workers ('popular literature', 'socialist realism'), but those which in one way or another transgress the code of the ruling class. The exemplary modern writer will then be Joyce or Mallarmé, not Zola or Aragon.

Descombes - Modern French Philosophy

I like Raymond Williams more than the structuralists, but he's no vulgar Marxist either.

[-] rufuscrispo@hexbear.net 3 points 21 hours ago

i agree with you if we are assessing the writing produced by the workshop model, but the critique here is how and why mfa programs were created, not necessarily how successful these programs were (or are) at producing the work their originators believed important. and forgive me, i'm mostly cribbing from workshops of empire, which lays out a pretty convincing case (with documentation to back it up) on which styles and aesthetics universities were to encourage (by way of syllabi, readings, students, etc.) and which were sidelined.

[-] Kieselguhr@hexbear.net 1 points 19 hours ago

i agree with you if we are assessing the writing produced by the workshop model, but the critique here is how and why mfa programs were created, not necessarily how successful these programs were (or are) at producing the work their originators believed important. and forgive me, i'm mostly cribbing from workshops of empire, which lays out a pretty convincing case (with documentation to back it up) on which styles and aesthetics universities were to encourage (by way of syllabi, readings, students, etc.) and which were sidelined.

The first comment was explicitly about "aesthetic priorities" btw, so this is taking a turn, but we are converging

Yeah workshops of empire is pretty convincing provided you don't think about it too much. I think our main disagreement is the claims of this book.

If we overemphasise grants instead of the artworks, then we don't really need hermeneutics and criticism, only bookkeeping and financial statements...

Overemphasising syllabi versus the actual artistic production of the teachers and the alumni is similarly misguided. Purpose of the system is what it does..did Iowa churn out vacuous "realism" promoting wide-eyed liberal humanism?

Yeah the grants themselves might have been pointed, but Iowa teachers and alumni don’t fit that simplification. The people who were leading the program like Engle and Cassil, might have been opportunistic in applying for all kinds of grants, but their aesthetic was a kind of Flaubertian Chekhovian realism, which was already dominant among highbrow literary types all around the west, even the Eastern bloc. Now you can say that's bourgeois, but then you also think about teachers and alumni, especially the actual novels produced, say between 1960 and 1980 and then it will be obvious that it's an oversimplification

When someone writes a book like Workshops of Empire they need to make the case as forceful and pointed as possible (for a variety of reasons), but the result is often flattens the landscape. But completely agree that institution like MFA programs need proper historical materialist evaluation.

Workshops of Empire is interesting just don't take it too seriously, it's one of those books that will be an interesting footnote in a literary history 30-40 years from now

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Gabriel Rockhill addresses this somewhat, if I recall correctly, but there are also books on this like Who Paid The Piper? and The Mighty Wurlitzer.

Sorry to just drop titles on you and run like I'm doing here. I'm tired.

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 11 points 1 day ago

Thank you for sharing these titles meow-hug

[-] glimmer_twin@hexbear.net 15 points 1 day ago

Could be the reasons you stated, with a side of “this industry is great for money laundering”

[-] Commiechameleon@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago

Heard about this fact with pop art, specifically Andy Warhol. Not truly surprised. But interesting how embedded it all is.

[-] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

Valerie Solanas did nothing wrong apart from being inaccurate

[-] mayakovsky@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

She was a terf

[-] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ah I did not know that, I was being jocular but yeah she did several things wrong

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

I don't think I have seen anything about Warhol getting funding like that but I'd love some reading material if you have it. I read thru a (again, kind of vacuous) biography from one of his contemporaries or models? and it seemed like they were all burnouts that squatted in an old warehouse and then rich kids that wanted a "scene" kind of glommed onto them.

[-] Commiechameleon@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

I've only seen it passing and can't remember if it was in the wilds of the Internet or hexbear proper. Sorry

[-] lurker_supreme@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

No sweat, thank you comrade

[-] Commiechameleon@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

I think it was the pop art scene. I know I said specifically Andy Warhol, but I was more referring to his style however, I do believe he was mentioned as being an asset or funded etc, iirc, but it's been ages since I've seen the info. Again sorry I can't be more helpful and ty for the kind words

[-] ElChapoDeChapo@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

rust-darkness plus the MoMa leadership has been really close with Epstein and Maxwell

[-] woodenghost@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

Here's a source.