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.

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.

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.

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

No sweat, thank you comrade