| The Case Against Abstract Art |
[Mar. 11th, 2007|05:33 pm] |
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For many it's hard to understand, much less fathom, that we are being manipulated at every turn. Only a few know how public schools are set up to help establish the "bright young minds" of the future. Less know about television and the internet's metabolism-lowering and Alpha wave-blocking attributes (as the obese and stupid make for better consumers). Even less know of the C.I.A.'s hand in establishing Top 40 Radio, as well as early Rock 'N' Roll.
But, almost no one knows about the shadowy hand of the government and their artistic brush strokes.
Art, like all other forms of media, is a tool useful in control. It inspires and elevates the nature of being human, but it can also anger and confuse.
For millennia, artists have had a special place in society. Those who patron the arts had an equal, if not higher, societal standing, and rightfully so, as they are usually the rich and those in power.
Artists, being held in such esteem, usually had control over the placement of their work in the market, as well as their own economic interests, sometimes making an artist equal to a politician or even nobility. That is, until the end of the Industrial Revolution as bohemian mythology set a standard where artist refused to see their works as commodity, while rejecting the values of everyday society, and so was born "the starving artist". Soon after, we had the rise of U.S. museum culture and the gallery system, placing control of the arts back in the hands of the rich and powerful, which are often members of industry and the government.
With the rise of the European art school known as Symbolism, as well as the Surrealist movement, also came a rise in Socialist thinking, and our government feared that when this found its way into the States, it would spread like wildfire in the underground.
It was a lucky strike for the Capitalist system when the Stalinist regime, following National Socialist ideals, brought about its artistic code of "Socialist realism", thus banning abstract and surreal modes of art. This did well for a new developing school of art from the U.S. called Abstract Expressionism, and, in turn, that school of art did well for the U.S. government.
Abstract Expressionism is actually several styles within one school, and range from "action painting" (the splatter and throwing of paint onto a canvas), "hard edge" (many straight lines on a canvas), and "color field" (simply one or two colors spread on a canvas). Artists of this school include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. To many AE seemed to have taken the childish look of Abstract art and made it even more child-like, with its lack of image identity and wild emotional impression - the total opposite of "Socialist realism".
To understand how this art was used as a tool to help the spread of Capitalism, I'll have to go into a brief history of The Museum of Modern Art (known as MOMA). MOMA was founded in 1929 by one of conspiracy theorists' favorite families, the Rockefellers. Just before 1940, Nelson Rockefeller took the helm, though soon leaving to become a cabinet member in President Roosevelt's Office of Inter-American Affairs, and later returning in '46.
Since WWII all policies of the war against Communism, as well as almost every Secretary of State has been shaped and educated by the Rockefellers. This also includes John Hay Whitney, who was MOMA's Board of Trustees' Chairman in the early 40s and was quoted as saying, "The Museum can educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men in defense of their own freedom." While it does sound a bit like propaganda, it'll sound more so after you read that before his boardship, John worked for the Offices of Strategic Services (who later made a name change to Central Intelligence Agency). MOMA then became, though minor, an actual war contractor, with a near-40 contracts for the Office of War Information, as well as the Library of Congress. The contracts were to ship art exhibits to Asian and Latin American countries on the brink of turning Communist, all under the direction of Porter McCray, who was working for the government's Office of Inter-American Affairs.
MOMA also had a hand in the Mexican muralist art movement, who were anti-Nationalists, coincidentally one would think, at the same time Mexico was thinking of nationalizing their oil fields, which threatened a large portion of Rockefeller's oil business.
MOMA's executive secretary from 1948 to '49 was Thomas W. Braden, who left the chair only to join the C.I.A., and staying there until 1954. Braden is best known, not for his art world connections, but for his 1967 article in The Saturday Evening Post, titled "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'". In that article Braden admitted that the Central Intelligence Agency gave money and political backing to a large number of cultural programs, not to mention founding the National Student Association (a confederacy of university student governments), and even Encounter Magazine (a literary arts publication).
After the Cold War the traveling art exhibit, as well as literature and art publications, became a mechanism to show fledgling countries or newfound governments and their people how rigid culture had become in Socialist regimes, and how stiff and inflexible artistic expression was in Communist controlled areas.
Now do you see where modern art becomes a tool of the Democracy and Capitalist systems?
The Museum of Modern Art and the Abstract Expressionist movement, whether it was known by the artists themselves, were used to sell a vision of America as being in the avant-garde, opposed to European Socialist and Russian Communist competitors. It was all a well-marketed show for the world to see how life, and art, is benefited under a Capitalist and Democratic society.
It's better than blood splatter, I guess, though that would look cool on a canvas.
- Adel
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