Fractal or Fake? - Pollock & CIA

On reading the (silly) article about authenticating supposed Pollock works (fractals?....riiiiight),
http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/127532-Fractal+or+Fake%3F+-+Novel+art-authentication+method+is+challenged
I couldn't help thinking of a recent post on countercurrents.org. on Pollock and the art movement of the time, and the involvement of CIA. Here is the entire piece, not too long, and pretty interesting, funny, and another sad illumination of the seemingly limitless extent of cultural brainwashing, subverting every sphere of human creativity....what the PTB do best!


http://www.countercurrents.org/rajiva200107.htm
Portrait Of The CIA As An Artist

By Lila Rajiva

20 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org

According to Frances Saunders, in her well-documented book, “The CIA and the Cultural Cold War,� the CIA financed and groomed the avant-garde art movement from which abstract expressionism, performance art and the other freak shows of the art world emerged. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the Agency wanted to move the center of art away from the social realism of European artists, which threatened the status quo with its powerful, realistic depictions of the human condition. So, it brought to national attention a group of bohemian artists who were busy struggling on the sidelines painting abstract scenes devoid of any identifiable representation of human figures. The groups included the likes of Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and William de Kooning.

In 1947 when Pollock dipped a stick into a gallon of diluted house paint and swirled and dripped color across his canvas, he had set off a new style in art. The man was famous for splattering paint on his canvasses any which way to create his paintings. Sometimes he even got young models with paint rubbed over their naked bodies to roll across the canvasses. So dissolute was Pollock that he was called the wild man of expressionism. After he became famous, rich people would invite him to their parties hoping he would live up to his reputation and pee in the fireplace. All the new artists were rebellious, disaffected, self-destructive. Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Pollock himself was killed in a drunken car crash in 1956….that looked suicidal. Another suspicious car accident finished off sculptor David Smith. And in the decade following, Kline drank himself to death, Smith died in a car accident, and Mark Rothko slashed his arms and bled to death after announcing, “"Everyone can see what a fraud I am."

That should have been enough of a hint that there was something dead-end in the whole business. But the CIA took a larger and more pragmatic view. It thought that the would-be geniuses might be useful props in an impending face-off with Joe Stalin. Of course, many of the artists themselves were socialist in sympathy or at least, they made gestures in that direction. Rothko, for instance, agreed to a commission from New York’s swankiest of the swank, the Four Seasons restaurant, solely in order to torment the patrons with claustrophobic scenes. He had modeled them on Michelangelo’s blocked off windows in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library in Florence. Michelangelo’s anteroom of death, leads off the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, and is a nightmare in architecture. Rothko was hell bent on reproducing its suffocating effect in the New York watering hole.

“I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room," he gloated, He wanted his paintings to make “those rich bastards� "feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up."

The CIA bankrolled a whole bevy of professional pointy heads and public pontificators like Irving Kristol, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Hannah Arendt, and Mary McCarthy. It was especially fond of ex-leftists like Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, and George Orwell who had ratted out establishment Stalinists. Money poured into cultural journals like the famous Partisan Review and Kenyon Review, among others. The Congress of Cultural Freedom was another Agency outfit, set up as an umbrella organization to bring together all possible opponents to Stalinist totalitarianism. All claimed, of course, that they were motivated only by their own convictions and threw up their hands in astonishment when they were later informed that CIA hand-outs were behind all those plushy conventions at Lake Como and Paris. But their surprise seems a tad rehearsed.

How could they not have known whom they were working for? And why else would sophisticated intellectuals with a keen eye for the atrocities of the Soviet Empire manage to wink… or shut both eyes… to what the America was up to in Guatemala, Greece, Iran, and Korea? Or to the U.S. support for the killings in Indochina and Algeria? How did they not know who was paying their salaries and funding their otherwise defunct rags?

But the CIA was also involved in co-opting the intellectuals in another subtler way. It was busy sending boatfuls of American artists to European shores in the hope that the bitter pill of imperialism would go down the throats of critics there better when it was sugar coated with song and dance. It especially liked to parade black artists like Marion Anderson and Louis Armstrong to undercut criticism about domestic racial policies. Of course, if the new minstrels forgot to sing according to script and started ad-libbing, like Richard Wright, they were quickly shoved back into the closet.

And then there was MOMA, or the Museum of Modern Art, into which the CIA emptied its coffers, in the hope of unearthing new styles of art that would dilute any tendency to political enthusiasm among artists. Abstract art was the Agency’s favorite. The CIA regarded it as an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism." MOMA’s founder, Nelson Rockefeller, even called it "free enterprise painting." Money poured through MOMA and another CIA outfit, the Fairfield Foundation, allowing Abstract Expressionism to rapidly take Europe’s chicest galleries by storm and change modern aesthetics irretrievably.

The apolitical art of the abstract artists was brandished as true art, because it was not tainted with political concerns. If this meant simply that we would in the future be spared the stutterings of Jeaneane Garofolo and Michael Douglas on Middle East politics or global warming, then we would be squarely in the CIA’s camp.

But of course, the CIA had no objection to artists posturing about politics at all so long as it was the right politics – which meant politics that suited the aims of American politicians in the post war period. And for America in those days what was most important was that the value of “freedom� be upheld against the tyranny of Stalinism.

An art that recognized no bounds, restrictions, rules, representations, or models was as suited as anything could be to used as propaganda for freedom. And so we had a bunch of marginalized, substance-addicted minor talents suddenly being touted as Renaissance geniuses. Noted critics compared Rothko to Michelangelo. One professor of art likened his paintings to Annunciations'. Another claimed he had seen a student rolling on the floor with joy in front of a Rothko painting at the Tate. Yet another critic called Pollock’s drip paintings the Big Bang of modern art and the “Promethean act� by which the painter “stole the sacred fire from Europe� . Michelangelo and Rembrandt had both been “made irrelevant� by drip painting. The hyperbole was typical of a public spectacle. Only repeat a big enough lie often enough, said Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, and it will quickly become received wisdom with the masses.

It soon became part of the gospel of modernity that art was something completely unrelated to society or politics, free of all recognizable human needs, limitations, restrictions, or conventions.

But the emperor’s clothes were not always opaque to everyone. Inevitably, even one besotted critic had to admit that he could spot the raw boody underneath. There were, it turns out, earthier foundations to the public spectacle of modern art than the Renaissance masters. Writing about Pollock’s predilection for squirting paint at random, David Dalton dredges up a memory of the painter recalled by an observant neighbor:

He saw himself standing beside his father on a flat rock, watching his father pissing, making patterns on the surface of the stone . . . and he wanted to do the same thing when he grew up.

__________________________________________________________

Without Earth, There is No Heaven - John Trudell
 
hm, how well established is it that the CIA did indeed manipulate the art-scene this way?
i know they had their fingers in all kinds of movements, but this is the first time i've read about them paying painters.
 
Uh,

Is the CIA connected with Pollack as with the artist(s) who also
painted the murals for Denver International Airport? What about
CIA funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)?

Just wondering....
 
Good thing I checked the search function before opening a new thread!
Iconoclast said:
hm, how well established is it that the CIA did indeed manipulate the art-scene this way?
Very. As the following article "Art and the CIA" by Robert Cummings shows :
In the play ART, someone buys an abstract painting at an enormous price, while his friends ponder
how they are going to tell him that it is inherently worthless. In the debate about abstraction and whether
it was entirely some sort of hoax, the new traditionalists ridicule its "flatness" and its absence of narrative,
while defenders of abstraction insist that representative art is a form of nostalgia that modernism sought
to eliminate. The defenders are definitely losing ground, but one wonders why they were ever regarded as credible.

The point that most art critics miss is that art is also a form of commerce, and not antithetical to it. The god of art
is the art market. And so one might ask, "How did a Jackson Pollock get to be worth so much money?"
Part of it had to do with the Cold War, which not only bloated the military budget, but distorted the art market as well.
Faux genius and con man Clement Greenberg was at the center of the scam. A former itinerant necktie salesman,
Greenberg teamed up with struggling abstract artist and mountebank, Barnett Newman, to promote a vision of art
that conveniently coincided with the objectives of the US Cold War Establishment. Indeed, Greenberg argued that
the avant-garde required the support of America’s elite classes, a self-serving concept that would promote his personal
interests as a collector.

As the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism clashed after the Second World War, the question of "What is art?"
became a significant issue in the struggle for dominance. Was art a vehicle of state propaganda to glorify a proletarian
revolution or depict an evil Hitler in his bunker at the end of the heroic struggle against fascism (never mind about the
Hitler-Stalin pact), or was it the product of individual creativity unrestrained by governmental control and censorship?
But since America was then in the throes of one of its tedious puritanical backlashes, the sensuality of great Western art,
as represented by say, Goya’s "Naked Maja," was out of the question. Deriving their central thesis from Islamic art that
representation of the sensual human form was interdicted by the sublime, the new Abstract Expressionists fit neatly into
what the American intelligence community desperately needed to rebut Soviet representational propaganda; an art that
was highly individualistic but which did not offend the sensibilities of conservative religion. A Baptist preacher or Bishop
Sheen could laugh at a Pollock, but he could not condemn it as obscene. Yet because "modern art" was widely derided,
it needed a boost from an invisible sponsor, which would turn out to be the CIA.

In this milieu Clement Greenberg came forth in support of the new art. Yes, the canvas was flat, and it should be covered
flatly by paint in abstraction, so beauty would be destroyed in the name of the sublime. And Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
director Richard Barr heralded this view when he quoted Greenberg’s co-conspirator, Newman, who infamously proclaimed,
"The impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty." Barr went even further – God was dead and had been replaced by
Abstract Expressionism.
The more Greenberg wrote in promotion of the Abstract Expressionists, and particularly Pollock’s "action painting," which
involved dripping paint on the canvas, the more he collected them at minimal prices before he had made them famous.
And as he increased his own power and influence, the more people wanted to buy these paintings, which served Greenberg’s
real personal objective; to make himself rich.

Fortunately for him, like the military industrial complex, he had a helping hand in the federal government. As Frances Stoner
Saunders explains in her brilliant book, Who Paid the Piper – The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, the CIA covertly supported
the Abstract Expressionist movement by funding exhibits all over the world in promotion of the idea that the culture of freedom
was superior to the culture of slavery, and by covertly promoting the purchasing of works by various private collections.
Indeed, the CIA named its biggest front in Europe the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It worked. Soviet art became a laughing
stock, and New York became the center of the art world, not Paris, where Picasso, a long-time member of the Communist party
and winner of the Stalin Peace Prize (who can forget his doves of peace?), still reigned supreme.
The CIA had stolen the show from Picasso, taking art a step further into a near mystical expression of unfettered human liberty
in the spirit of free enterprise. Nelson Rockefeller, whose family created the MoMA, actually referred to Abstract Expressionism
as "free enterprise painting." But like so many Rockefeller ventures, it was state supported, so that his own collection of Abstract
Expressionist works ended up being worth a considerable fortune.

But why, then, did it come to an end? The Cold War exploded into the Vietnam War and rebellion overtook the arts. The social
revolution of the Sixties brought with it Pop Art, Op Art, and various forms of social protest art, forcing Abstract Expressionism to
the sidelines, even if prices were still good. Confronted with James Rosenquist’s "F-111," abstraction lost its force. Even more than
this, the answer lies in a paraphrasing of a remark by comedian Mort Sahl about why the student movement ended. "The government
withdrew its funding."

Richard Cummings [send him mail] has taught at the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the University of the West Indies, Barbados,
and St. Catherine’s College Cambridge. He holds the PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and "completed
with distinction" the 21st Session at Cornell University, of The School of Criticism and Theory. He is the author of the comedy, "Soccer
Moms From Hell" (recently produced in New York) and the forthcoming novel, The Immortalists
Also related is a very interesting article "Artists, Secrets and CIA`s Cultural Policy" by Manfred J. Holler:
http://www(dot)nadfly.com/docs/secreart.pdf, from which this little quote origins:
There are many paradoxes embedded in Abstract Expressionism; some are embedded
to the inconsistency of its claim of individualism and freedom, on the one hand, and its policy
effects which focus on dominance of ideas, ideology, and power on the other.
The 100 $ question, which arises:
Since it seems to be highly unlikely that the Secret Intelligency Agencys haven stopped supporting and manipulating
the world of Culture and Art, what exactly have they been up to since the 60ies?
Any informations?
 
As a postscript it has to be noted, that this under radar meddling by the CIA with the Art World is no little footnotey thing.
Even if their influence stopped during the 60ies, the repercussions can be still felt today. A relative of mine who for the
past 25 years regularly exhibits his realist paintings (which are pretty good, btw) made on more then one occasion the
experience of potential buyers who really liked his work but at the last minute refrained from buying and instead opted to
buy something abstract, because then they didn`t have to defend themselves in front of their "artist friends".
(And of course, his works have not been admitted to any major art shows since the late 80ies)
Any american or european art students during the 50ies and 60ies who were inclined to work figuratively were discouraged
from doing so and saw themselves as outcasts.
For years I`m observing politicians and captains of industry like the pathological head of NESTLE regularly posing in front
of abstract paintings.
For me this is just another nail in the coffin of the illusion of free and independent thinking.
Were are we not being manipulated and made to parrot "authority" figures?
 
Good ole' Alan Watt goes on about this constantly, CIA influence in art, poetry, fiction, drama, music, etc., though I've yet to hear him source any of the claims. Calls it "culture creation" that's done from the top down by the "guardian class" to direct society for specific purposes and make all things predictable.
 
Yeah, I`ve followed with great interest the Alan Watt threads, having seen some of his videos.
I also find him quite depressing. And he doesn`t seem to tell where he gets his information.
Do you happen to remember a specific video on this subject or does he merely sprinkle related
stuff here and there? I don`t think I could endure more then one hour of his talks.
 
AdPop said:
Good ole' Alan Watt goes on about this constantly, CIA influence in art, poetry, fiction, drama, music, etc., though I've yet to hear him source any of the claims. Calls it "culture creation" that's done from the top down by the "guardian class" to direct society for specific purposes and make all things predictable.
Maybe there is nothing that can be pinned down specifically on the CIA. But it does seem to me that this kind of thing would happen naturally in a pathocracy anyway, as an inevitable part of the ponerizing process:

That some (every?) field of human creative endeavour is fundamentally misunderstood by pathocrats (psycho's can't see creativity for what it is, and maybe have a 'biological' aversion to it), and so is hijacked, and co-opted into a pathological 'tool' (eg for propaganda, or making money, or whatever), and thereby stifling the original creativity, which nevertheless continues to attempt to escape out round the edges of the pathocratic rules, never quite understanding why it is the least-creative stuff that seems to be encouraged and have money thrown at it, while the most creative that is left to rot.

It would be surprising for this NOT to happen. look at the music biz, for a start.

I think it doesn't matter which specific faction(s) has control of these things, whoever it is, they're more powerful than you and me anyway. the important thing is to understand how the process works (Ponerology), and to not get flattened by it if at all possible.
 
Re: Fractal or Fake? - Pollock & CIA

Just came across this thread.

nemo said:
As a postscript it has to be noted, that this under radar meddling by the CIA with the Art World is no little footnotey thing.
Even if their influence stopped during the 60ies, the repercussions can be still felt today. A relative of mine who for the
past 25 years regularly exhibits his realist paintings (which are pretty good, btw) made on more then one occasion the
experience of potential buyers who really liked his work but at the last minute refrained from buying and instead opted to
buy something abstract, because then they didn`t have to defend themselves in front of their "artist friends".

(And of course, his works have not been admitted to any major art shows since the late 80ies)
Any american or european art students during the 50ies and 60ies who were inclined to work figuratively were discouraged
from doing so and saw themselves as outcasts.
For years I`m observing politicians and captains of industry like the pathological head of NESTLE regularly posing in front
of abstract paintings.
For me this is just another nail in the coffin of the illusion of free and independent thinking.
Were are we not being manipulated and made to parrot "authority" figures?
Leaving the CIA issue aside for a moment, the bold section seems to me to paint a sort of interesting light on the status of comics in the art world. I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but got the impression that comics have not been accepted into the art world quite as readily as more "highly abstract" works. Of course comics themselves are largely tools of dissociation, it just stands out to me here that even so, comics involve lots of figure drawing, not to mention being capable of carrying a message via the text. That would make them potentially more dangerous than "bits and blobs", right?

On the aside, this also reminds me of something I thought I read on SOTT (but can't find at the moment - I recall it mentioning ) about there being connections between Disney and the CIA (or another organization). Not sure.
 
Re: Fractal or Fake? - Pollock & CIA

HowToBe said:
Leaving the CIA issue aside for a moment, the bold section seems to me to paint a sort of interesting light on the status of comics in the art world. I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but got the impression that comics have not been accepted into the art world quite as readily as more "highly abstract" works. Of course comics themselves are largely tools of dissociation, it just stands out to me here that even so, comics involve lots of figure drawing, not to mention being capable of carrying a message via the text. That would make them potentially more dangerous than "bits and blobs", right?
I think there is some acceptance of comics in the art world. For example, one of Roy Lichtenstein's comic-inspired paintings sold for US$43 million in 2011. A page of drawings by Herge for "Tintin in America" sold for US $3.7 million in 2014. The first comic to feature Superman also sold for US$3.5 million in 2014.
 
Re: Fractal or Fake? - Pollock & CIA

There is a Jackson Pollock painting - "Blue Poles" hanging in the auspicious Federal Parliament of Australia building in Canberra. When purchased it was worth (well they paid) $1.3 million Aussie dollars.
As for whether the work is fractal, I'm thinking it might be, it certainly is chaotic, in a fractal kind of way.
It was quite controversial at the time.

As for what the CIA is putting its money into these days, maybe you need go no further than Disney.
 
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