I love art. Contemporary art is a bunch of ugly wankery by pretentious people who are bored of actual beauty and can only amuse themselves by creating ugly stuff, then claiming "you just don't get it". The world would be a significantly better place without contemporary art in it.
karmakurtisaani · 2026-08-25 03:01:40 UTC
This could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.
nine_k · 2026-08-25 03:22:30 UTC
Indeed. Once galleries became significant buyers of art, scandalous art became an attractive thing to produce: it commanded outsized attention.
The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
refactor_master · 2026-08-25 04:04:59 UTC
1850? I wager we could go all the way back if we tried.
> (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".
If there is any change I could make to the human personality at large it would be the reflexive opinion that anything you don't understand, or even dislike, is automatically morally wrong.
neuroticnews25 · 2026-08-25 06:48:46 UTC
There is nothing to understand, bunch of jerks signaling sophistication or laundering money while poisoning the soul of men.
dgellow · 2026-08-25 08:28:12 UTC
The conflation of art with the art market is a good litmus test…
neuroticnews25 · 2026-08-25 10:18:42 UTC
The art that sucks but sells is arguably more excusable then the art that just sucks.
wredcoll · 2026-08-25 22:45:17 UTC
This might shock you, but most art is made by artists. Artists also tend to spend lots of their time consuming other art. This informs the type of art they create.
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
Scrapemist · 2026-08-25 04:11:12 UTC
Contemporary art is the mirror of our time.
al_borland · 2026-08-25 07:32:02 UTC
Should we appreciate art we were manipulated into liking, or pretending to appreciate?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
colechristensen · 2026-08-25 03:14:34 UTC
The leadership of nations requires you to put pressure on the thoughts and minds of your people, left to their own devices those minds will simply be shaped by someone else.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
left-struck · 2026-08-25 03:42:51 UTC
I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves.
Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power.
But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.
verisimi · 2026-08-25 06:19:47 UTC
> I would fund things which make people less susceptible to manipulation and more equipped to think for themselves.
This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.
left-struck · 2026-08-25 08:27:54 UTC
How would that be manipulative?
verisimi · 2026-08-25 19:52:24 UTC
If you alter people's natural behaviour so that they are less manipulative, do you think this is the same as having not taken that action? It is a (further) unnatural intervention. It would be like giving someone an emetic because they ate too much.
The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree.
The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.
electricboots · 2026-08-25 08:33:24 UTC
I think we can work together and provide ourselves freedom/collective agency/ some amount of say in the order of things
ninalanyon · 2026-08-25 09:09:57 UTC
So where should one look?
It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.
verisimi · 2026-08-25 19:57:06 UTC
One should look to oneself, and act according to what you believe to be right. Internalising an externally provided morality is not it.
derektank · 2026-08-25 04:04:53 UTC
I wouldn’t because the CIA is explicitly barred by Congress (Title 50 U.S.C. § 3093) from conducting influence operations intended to affect American public opinion since the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991.
telotortium · 2026-08-25 07:02:44 UTC
Hence why USAID was (allegedly) co-opted to perform the same role.
The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.
dgellow · 2026-08-25 08:22:26 UTC
Yeah, if that’s true we should get those people their own agency and let them manage museums
colechristensen · 2026-08-25 02:42:20 UTC
“educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”
Funny how times have changed and more or less everyone on every side is fighting for the strength and survival of their own groupthink and little more.
sublinear · 2026-08-25 03:01:33 UTC
Eventually, people realize they will never agree and therefore don't have to fight.
They realize the majority of their beliefs already existed before they were born and will continue on after they're dead. They have nothing to add to the conversation while they are too busy fighting. They turn their focus to developing their ideas peacefully and let their subcultures flourish once again.
This isn't the first cycle and won't be the last. The last major cycle was in the 20th century due to broadcast media. I think people sometimes forget how relatively young the internet is.
simpaticoder · 2026-08-25 03:21:29 UTC
"Live and let live" is in fundamental tension with "protect the weak." ALL aggressive ideologies act as heroes protecting others from oppression. There is a barely expressible thing that allows people to live in peace with those they disagree with. It is a personality trait, an aesthetic, a mood associated with the best of the Enlightenment but never described by it. Perhaps people need relative silence, a few good books, physical labor, hand-made goods, and slow travel to attain it. I often wonder at how boldly people think they can reduce the enormous, holistic experience of being of a particular time and place and call the effect simply "reason".
attila-lendvai · 2026-08-25 07:28:27 UTC
i agree with your sentiment, but what you disagree in is crucial here.
there's a class of topics where disagreement means the death and dispair of one side.
hoping to live and let live, with a disagreeing party that doesn't "let live", is a fool's errand.
rcxdude · 2026-08-25 08:15:41 UTC
This is just another 'people should just agree with me' that operates on a meta-level.
sublinear · 2026-08-25 14:08:29 UTC
I'm not saying "agree to disagree". The question of agreement implies the awareness of a conflict at all.
I'm saying that every time we have new media there are opportunists bugging everyone else that normally wouldn't care. Time and energy are precious. Humanity's default state is, and should be, ignorance and apathy.
If those last two words boil your blood, you gotta take a look at the mirror and reconsider why. You don't have to reply. You don't even have to remember anything I'm writing here. Just let go and be free. That doesn't have to mean you agreed/disagreed with me. You can in fact put the genie back in the bottle by completely abandoning it.
whoareyouthen · 2026-08-25 07:16:58 UTC
I don't think it was genuine then as well, just a slogan for "fighting the communists".
You lie today, you lied then.
Same with "let my people go" for the Soviet jews, it was more about draining the "human capital" from USSR.
Eufrat · 2026-08-25 02:57:56 UTC
Sounds like it was more about spreading American culture as part of the Cold War. This feels a lot more benign compared to Modernist architecture which seems to have fascist tendencies what with Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson being literal Nazi sympathizers.
mauvehaus · 2026-08-25 03:00:35 UTC
Oh man, I just listened to an episode of Decoder Ring about why making classical realist sculptures in the US is a challenge. It gives some interesting context about the rejection of realism in the post-war West:
Thanks so much for sharing this! I went looking for what I’d call modern “masterwork” statues a year or so ago and had come to this exact same conclusion. Glad that other people are noticing!
OroPla · 2026-08-25 09:53:14 UTC
Maybe that is why realism is chased so much in video games in the west, while eastern countries rarely are interested.
NordStreamYacht · 2026-08-25 03:01:41 UTC
More likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
Far more things/movements are orchestrated than are organic. This is to me one of the most surprising things I have learned as I got older.
pkul · 2026-08-25 04:01:43 UTC
I am starting to be under the impression that movements are steered by leaders but formed only when the underlying conditions are present. No single element can make the movement.
I am reluctant to believe stories like "The CIA created modern art", as it is just a single part, although a very influential part, of the movement.
I say this as somebody who is very cautious about believing anything and am quick to call things (probably incorrectly) propaganda or disseminated by paid actors.
zmgsabst · 2026-08-25 07:11:34 UTC
Is the claim “created”?
My understanding is that the CIA influenced the rise of modern art over Soviet realism, eg, by hosting shows and bidding up prices.
That is “created” in the sense that a movement would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage, but not “created” as in invented absent an underlying cohort of sincere artists.
If you believe the CIA was an important and necessary part of the movement, you seem to agree they created.1 modern art, even if they co-opted rather than created.2 the style.
Barrin92 · 2026-08-25 07:50:23 UTC
>would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage
this seems entire implausible. Many of the expressionist, surrealist or modernist artists were European refugees who fled fascism, the government apparently spent less on their efforts than an average regional election today costs, and expressionism still exists.
This is the American equivalent of one of those 'are the Chinese behind this' conspiracies every time anything Chinese starts to be popular. Governments who can't get things done for billions apparently suddenly can invent entire art forms with a few million bucks.
No doubt there were people who thought abstract art would make for good advertisement for American liberalism, but no they did not invent, steer or even meaningfully influence it
notarobot123 · 2026-08-25 08:09:18 UTC
I assume by "orchestrated" you mean intended by the people involved in making them happen. Humans act in the world. Some people have power and influence that they bring to bear on their activities and desired outcomes. It's true.
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
mikert89 · 2026-08-25 14:10:28 UTC
I meant orchestrated in a subversive way
Tangurena2 · 2026-08-25 12:07:15 UTC
I think the first time that was brought to my attention was one of our host's essays: The Submarine.
A great book on this is 'Active Measures'. Most things have an organic start, which are then amplified / co-opted by various actors.
The concept of Nuclear Winter first came up in the USA, then the Russians caught wind of it and claimed they had independently reached the same conclusions. This helped them turn public opinion against the deployment of more missile bases in Europe... conveniently after they had already deployed theirs.
WD-42 · 2026-08-25 03:11:44 UTC
I don’t know if this is a reaction to AI or something, but recently I’ve only been interested in classical/realism art. I just can’t do abstract cubes anymore. The default wallpaper of windows 11 is a perfect example - I hate it. Give me a wallpaper of some painting from the Renaissance.
tacitusarc · 2026-08-25 03:24:11 UTC
I feel like a picture of rolling hills with spring wheat and a blue sky wouldn’t go amiss
WD-42 · 2026-08-25 03:28:00 UTC
They should bring it back
rramon · 2026-08-25 03:40:08 UTC
Kinda paradox because AI seems better at replicating complex classic paintings and realism than rather simple modern parametric imagery.
lmf4lol · 2026-08-25 05:59:40 UTC
until you begin to really LOOK at it
rramon · 2026-08-25 09:48:14 UTC
Yeah, flaws hide within the complexity, with simple stuff it's more obvious.
WD-42 · 2026-08-25 12:21:40 UTC
It’s not about what ai can or can’t do. It’s a new appreciation for both artistry AND skill.
tavavex · 2026-08-25 06:38:00 UTC
Fun fact - the default Windows 10 wallpaper was actually shot on a real camera in physical space[0], making it one of the exceptions. It's disappointing that they went back to 3D renders in 11, but it was probably done so they could make their light and dark mode versions match exactly.
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
trgn · 2026-08-25 13:47:57 UTC
i wonder about this too.
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
WD-42 · 2026-08-25 15:30:50 UTC
That is an interesting thought. To me I think I think my brain is being re wired to appreciate effort. Not saying there isn’t modern art that doesn’t take effort. But paintings from the masters is a good place to start.
claytonjy · 2026-08-25 03:16:04 UTC
Betteridge’s law prevails. A fun read, but not as fun as the title suggests.
tl;dr Modern art existed before the CIA and even CIA predecessors did not originate it, but they did push it abroad to show that America is great because we put up with modern art made by socialists depite most americans disliking both the art and the artists
zhivota · 2026-08-25 03:50:35 UTC
The interesting thing to me is, despite it being hard to imagine today, back then this was actually a strange thing, and did actually serve as a demonstration of American freedom of expression.
Hard to imagine today because this kind of weird art comes from just about everywhere with a few exceptions now.
Interesting to read about how it actually was the work of a few elite institutions that made this happen. Agreed the CIA angle is a bit weak, to me it's more a story about the Rockefellers and their compatriots who funded this stuff.
altmanaltman · 2026-08-25 04:05:48 UTC
But I mean is this something that is supposed to be shocking or revelaing? All countries want to promote their culture so they win the soft war and influence. You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us? Look up what the south korean gov planned and how it worked out overall.
It is interesting they were taunting the Soviets by saying "look our artists are so free even we dont know wtf they are making but we support them!" rather than "look how amazing modern art is" lol
331c8c71 · 2026-08-25 07:06:23 UTC
> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us?
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
altmanaltman · 2026-08-25 12:21:32 UTC
No, I don't think K-pop is a government initiative. It is an actual fact.
> In the late '90s, when Asia went through a huge financial crisis, South Korea's leaders decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. So the country's government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop.
Exactly, it is a weird title. Modern art is as much of a "psy-op" as:
- grocery stores
- NASA
- rock music
- psychedelics and hippies
- a strong middle class
- affordable vehicles and the highway system
- Hollywood movies
- Books
and just about anything. Cultural "warfare" is a different ballgame. K-Pop and K-dramas are "cultural warfare" from Korea. J-pop and anime from Japan (here's a clickbait title: Was Studio Ghibli a Japanese Psy-Op?). So is Thai Food and avocados. Anything that makes the country look good or even become more well known outside its borders can be considered a "psy-op". But not in the sense that any reasonable person would interpret the term...
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
Oddly enough kpop is the result of American music taking over the world.
BLKNSLVR · 2026-08-25 06:38:42 UTC
Soon to overtaken by nkpop if I'm reading the room accurately.
Tangurena2 · 2026-08-25 12:15:37 UTC
I remember from one of my art history courses that it was more a rejection of Hitler & Stalin. Those 2 loved representational art so much that "the art world" took decades before representational art was acceptable.
Pretty embarrassing that this is the title of a post on JSTOR.
Modern art started in the late 1800s, long before the CIA or its predecessor existed. Using this term to describe contemporary art, or abstract art more generally, is an (anti?) shibboleth that indicates you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I realize the article is about mid century artists, but I’m certain it’s being upvoted here because people think the title is referring to contemporary, 21st century art.
If you meant something more specific, like abstract expressionism, then again, it’s mostly just a continuation of previous trends. Sure, the government sponsored some things, but it’s not as if postwar American artists invented the entire concept of modern art (which is what the article seems to be implying.)
And if you meant very abstract / performance contemporary art, the kind of thing uninformed people like to describe as modern art, again, most of that got started in the 60s (with antecedents in the 10s, 20s, etc.) and was mostly by people the CIA thought were subversives.
vlovich123 · 2026-08-25 05:00:53 UTC
Did you actually read the article? It lays out a pretty compelling case that the CIA established funding sources and magazines to popularize American modern art and make it a worldwide phenomenon / a cultural export to have Americans be taken seriously as taste makers.
keiferski · 2026-08-25 05:15:54 UTC
Yes, I did and as I said, the title is pretty out of line with the actual article. Which itself has almost zero mention of modern art / 1930s-40-50s art outside of the American context.
Modern art was not a CIA psy op. Modern art precedes the CIA by a century. Mid-century American art was popularized in part by American government organizations. These are entirely different claims.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
vlovich123 · 2026-08-25 16:49:47 UTC
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Comments
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/
The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
> (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art
I just thought of mid 1800s, since around that time people got really experimental with different styles of painting.
https://youtu.be/H6_eqxh-Qok?si=zGXsyHk_XF3Gu2o_
Here's an anecdote: Pablo Picasso learned to paint realistic scenes, including humans, the equivalent of Da Vinci or Michelangelo, around the age of 17 or 18.
Where do you go from there? In his case, he went towards cubism and other such "modern art". Why do you suppose that is?
Modern art has been the butt of many jokes over the years. A canvas painted white, a banana duck taped to a wall, literal piles of trash… the bar for what we call art is basically on the floor. A literal bar on the floor, given a good story, could itself be called art.
Art generally implies some level of skill. While some modern art can still fall into that category, other stuff requires no real skill, just the right connections and for enough people to buy into the grift.
The morality in it comes from your motivation and methods. Secretly giving piles of money to the weirdos you successfully identify as being the leaders of artistic movements to amplify those movements can't be all that bad.
The question of the day is if you were the CIA trying to do the same thing today, who and what would you fund?
Because I believe in democracy not as a political tool but as a fundamental right. I don’t wish to use democracy to gain more power.
But maybe that’s why I’ll never be in that position, to make that choice.
This also would be manipulative. If you think society can provide you freedom, you are looking in the wrong places.
The anti-manipulation training or the emetic could be beneficial, I agree.
The 'proper' answer would be to address the manipulator, to prevent their interventions, so that they can live their lives naturally, if they are not harming anyone.
It seems tome that society is very much what does provide freedom, just not all freedoms.
The right-wing areas of the internet, even now, say the decline of whatever progressive or left-wing phenomenon they’re talking about is because they ran out of money after USAID was defunded.
Funny how times have changed and more or less everyone on every side is fighting for the strength and survival of their own groupthink and little more.
They realize the majority of their beliefs already existed before they were born and will continue on after they're dead. They have nothing to add to the conversation while they are too busy fighting. They turn their focus to developing their ideas peacefully and let their subcultures flourish once again.
This isn't the first cycle and won't be the last. The last major cycle was in the 20th century due to broadcast media. I think people sometimes forget how relatively young the internet is.
there's a class of topics where disagreement means the death and dispair of one side.
hoping to live and let live, with a disagreeing party that doesn't "let live", is a fool's errand.
I'm saying that every time we have new media there are opportunists bugging everyone else that normally wouldn't care. Time and energy are precious. Humanity's default state is, and should be, ignorance and apathy.
If those last two words boil your blood, you gotta take a look at the mirror and reconsider why. You don't have to reply. You don't even have to remember anything I'm writing here. Just let go and be free. That doesn't have to mean you agreed/disagreed with me. You can in fact put the genie back in the bottle by completely abandoning it.
You lie today, you lied then.
Same with "let my people go" for the Soviet jews, it was more about draining the "human capital" from USSR.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo
Your tax dollars, hard at work!
I am reluctant to believe stories like "The CIA created modern art", as it is just a single part, although a very influential part, of the movement.
I say this as somebody who is very cautious about believing anything and am quick to call things (probably incorrectly) propaganda or disseminated by paid actors.
My understanding is that the CIA influenced the rise of modern art over Soviet realism, eg, by hosting shows and bidding up prices.
That is “created” in the sense that a movement would have been smaller or fizzled without their patronage, but not “created” as in invented absent an underlying cohort of sincere artists.
If you believe the CIA was an important and necessary part of the movement, you seem to agree they created.1 modern art, even if they co-opted rather than created.2 the style.
this seems entire implausible. Many of the expressionist, surrealist or modernist artists were European refugees who fled fascism, the government apparently spent less on their efforts than an average regional election today costs, and expressionism still exists.
This is the American equivalent of one of those 'are the Chinese behind this' conspiracies every time anything Chinese starts to be popular. Governments who can't get things done for billions apparently suddenly can invent entire art forms with a few million bucks.
No doubt there were people who thought abstract art would make for good advertisement for American liberalism, but no they did not invent, steer or even meaningfully influence it
That said, there's a tendency (that I think increases as we age) to want to explain everything in terms of order, control and power. Explaining away the world's complexities seems to be a pretty strong human trait.
Maybe the idea of a complex and uncertain world is just too uncomfortable for us to accept.
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The concept of Nuclear Winter first came up in the USA, then the Russians caught wind of it and claimed they had independently reached the same conclusions. This helped them turn public opinion against the deployment of more missile bases in Europe... conveniently after they had already deployed theirs.
[0] https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(photograph)#
I never could, its boring low effort blah to me when standing next to Rembrandt (they never will but you get the idea). It just doesn't induce any strong emotions, and why the heck should I force that process just to feel conforming to expected general emotions in the crowd.
Do you see the same value, and extend same respect towards say Chris Sawyer' Transport Tycoon made mostly in assembly, or some claude's 5 minute output to prompt, even if it roughly works? 'But I had this idea, man!
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
tl;dr Modern art existed before the CIA and even CIA predecessors did not originate it, but they did push it abroad to show that America is great because we put up with modern art made by socialists depite most americans disliking both the art and the artists
Hard to imagine today because this kind of weird art comes from just about everywhere with a few exceptions now.
Interesting to read about how it actually was the work of a few elite institutions that made this happen. Agreed the CIA angle is a bit weak, to me it's more a story about the Rockefellers and their compatriots who funded this stuff.
It is interesting they were taunting the Soviets by saying "look our artists are so free even we dont know wtf they are making but we support them!" rather than "look how amazing modern art is" lol
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
> In the late '90s, when Asia went through a huge financial crisis, South Korea's leaders decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. So the country's government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...
British Invasion was not a state thing.
That said, the article is still interesting and I wouldn't ignore it just because the dumb title.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhQ5678cJU8
Some previous discussion:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204
Modern art started in the late 1800s, long before the CIA or its predecessor existed. Using this term to describe contemporary art, or abstract art more generally, is an (anti?) shibboleth that indicates you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I realize the article is about mid century artists, but I’m certain it’s being upvoted here because people think the title is referring to contemporary, 21st century art.
If you meant something more specific, like abstract expressionism, then again, it’s mostly just a continuation of previous trends. Sure, the government sponsored some things, but it’s not as if postwar American artists invented the entire concept of modern art (which is what the article seems to be implying.)
And if you meant very abstract / performance contemporary art, the kind of thing uninformed people like to describe as modern art, again, most of that got started in the 60s (with antecedents in the 10s, 20s, etc.) and was mostly by people the CIA thought were subversives.
Modern art was not a CIA psy op. Modern art precedes the CIA by a century. Mid-century American art was popularized in part by American government organizations. These are entirely different claims.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".