Pretty interesting piece from 1995 about the relationship between the CIA and abstract expressionism. Hat tip goes to naked capitalism who posted the link today. Upon a little research on Wikipedia it seems there is at least some doubt about the validity of this connection, although there are a number of sources in the article that back up the story.

One of the sources, a former chief of the relevant CIA division named Tom Braden, says, “We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union.”

The CIA had to support the avant-garde arts discreetly because the public at large didn’t like them. Whatever the impacts on the Soviet Union were, this also has a direct impact on the United States because their funding added cultural priority to the avant-garde. I don’t know enough about abstract expressionism to say how much this shift impacted the art itself, and I can’t say how much it impacted the eventual popularity of the art. The article says the movement would have been popular regardless.

Yet Braden posits: “It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it. And after many centuries people say, ‘Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!’” Whether or not Jackson Pollock will attain the stature of the Sistine Chapel is for history to decide, but the analogy is insightful in terms of the CIA’s motivations and views. They found an art uniquely American and canonized it.

This of course bears parallels to modern media companies, except instead of putting vast amounts of money behind the avant-garde they put it behind the average. But the point is the same: the amount of money available determines the social position of a given artwork. This is one of the problems when capitalism and art join. It presupposes the work’s value.

In the days of physical media, the arrangement made more sense although it was just as distasteful. See underground music of the 70s and 80s for a sense of that. By propagating popular culture with the weight of money, media corporations–and the government–are not letting culture develop but mandating it themselves. This is not to say that all corporate art is bad: I love some major label bands and some Hollywood films. But to assume that our culture would be this way without corporate money is disingenuous, and to say that there can’t be another method of distributing art is blind. The times have changed. Media has changed. It’s time our systems of art and value change as well.

If any readers have more up-to-date insight into the relationship between the CIA & modernist art, I’m all ears.