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ivan_gammel 8 minutes ago [-]
Not the first time when the Default Country thinks they invented everything. The title is almost comical.
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
gizajob 58 minutes ago [-]
The CIA didn’t invent the camera which was really the trigger for the arrival of modern art and the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world.
At the same time though, if you go somewhere like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, upon leaving that fantastic building it does occur to you that the whole thing is an outpost for American artistic culture, or if you want to frame it another way, American cultural imperialism because every artwork in there (pretty much, there’s a yayoi kusama mirror box for the instagrammers) is American and something of an modernist and contemporary assault against every tradition of European art, including Picasso. So to frame the whole of American artistic culture as the CIA’s doing is like the tail wagging the dog of a broader phenomenon – rich Americans in general funded this movement into existence and the CIA likely joined in.
Mikhail_Edoshin 12 minutes ago [-]
Art became an investment and artistic properties ceased to matter.
gizajob 5 minutes ago [-]
The bankers could make the art themselves then, if that were the case. Fine art still needs to be made by artists. Conceptual art can be made by anyone with a concept.
mikert89 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
zmgsabst 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
attila-lendvai 16 minutes ago [-]
splitting a canvas in two is a perfect "art form" that anyone can do to launder some millions into "honestly earned" money...
pir8life4me 2 hours ago [-]
Soft power - Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop.
TeMPOraL 11 minutes ago [-]
True Soft Power - Hollywood, and associated media industry, which happens to be the platform through which "Russian ballet, Japanese manga, k-pop", etc. reach people.
With the Internet and some competing heavy-weights, it may no longer be an US soft superpower it was before, but it still retains its important quality: it's ubiquitous, ever-present, and so enormous it's hard to notice - much like fish don't think much about the water they swim in.
riffruff24 2 hours ago [-]
and dont forget the pandas
pir8life4me 2 hours ago [-]
Chinese pandas, the reward for friends. Not friends? No pandas for you!
45 minutes ago [-]
mauvehaus 5 hours ago [-]
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!
Man, this might be a case where the average HN reader is less informed than the general public.
I thought this was well known. Like, the Men In Black movies literally have a scene lampshading this.
rbbydotdev 3 hours ago [-]
Incredible to believe the CIA has more sway over artistic movements than actual artists.
uxhacker 2 minutes ago [-]
And the CIA actually had rather good taste
featwanz 8 minutes ago [-]
More incredible to believe the most powerful clandestine agency in the world wouldn't want to hold sway over artistic movements to their own end.
onion2k 3 hours ago [-]
Wealthy patronage has always steered art, and the CIA has a lot of money.
dreambuffer 2 hours ago [-]
The CIA hires "actual" artists, all the time and in great numbers. They have a creative writing division.
lattice_epochs 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like modern art was the kpop of its era.
BLKNSLVR 1 hours ago [-]
Soon to overtaken by nkpop if I'm reading the room accurately.
analog31 4 hours ago [-]
Oddly enough kpop is the result of American music taking over the world.
fithisux 2 hours ago [-]
Policies shape directions. That is a fact. It can happen with legislature, funding, para-military and corruption.
Art can be a direction shaped with above methods.
colechristensen 5 hours ago [-]
“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 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
"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 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
whoareyouthen 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
WD-42 5 hours ago [-]
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.
tavavex 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
And here I was thinking any psyop was necessarily bad.
colechristensen 5 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
derektank 4 hours ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
gigatree 5 hours ago [-]
Are you saying modern art is positive?
math-man 5 hours ago [-]
Do you not appreciate art?
al_borland 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
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 5 hours ago [-]
This could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.
refactor_master 4 hours ago [-]
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".
Indeed, I would not be surprised if there was someone calling the first cave paintings awful vandalism.
I just thought of mid 1800s, since around that time people got really experimental with different styles of painting.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 4 hours ago [-]
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 59 minutes ago [-]
There is nothing to understand, bunch of jerks signaling sophistication or laundering money while poisoning the soul of men.
Scrapemist 4 hours ago [-]
Contemporary art is the mirror of our time.
3 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
cindyllm 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
claytonjy 5 hours ago [-]
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
godelski 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 41 minutes ago [-]
> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us?
How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?
4 hours ago [-]
ks2048 4 hours ago [-]
Is calling everything a Psy-Op a Psy-Op?
NordStreamYacht 5 hours ago [-]
More likely it was a money laundering operation disguised as a psyop.
3 hours ago [-]
senectus1 4 hours ago [-]
lol i think the CIA is nowhere near competent enough to even consider that idea.
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hn_submit 54 minutes ago [-]
I had to laugh out loud when I read the title. Blaming everything on the CIA seems to be the raison du joure these days.
Modern art, as everyone should know, started in 1860s in Europe inspired by technological advances, globalization of trade and cultural exchange. Japanese art made huge blast, photography pushed to seek new forms of expression, social progress demanded new messages and new images. We had impressionism, post-impressionism, then the whole explosion of artistic forms and ideas in 1910s-1930s. All of that was Modern Art.
CIA was founded in 1947 and CIA-sponsored soft power projection was a relatively short period in the world history lasting just a few decades, a part of the bigger game played between the USA and the Soviets, which did exactly the same (and thanks to whom we have now e.g. Studio Ghibli).
At the same time though, if you go somewhere like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, upon leaving that fantastic building it does occur to you that the whole thing is an outpost for American artistic culture, or if you want to frame it another way, American cultural imperialism because every artwork in there (pretty much, there’s a yayoi kusama mirror box for the instagrammers) is American and something of an modernist and contemporary assault against every tradition of European art, including Picasso. So to frame the whole of American artistic culture as the CIA’s doing is like the tail wagging the dog of a broader phenomenon – rich Americans in general funded this movement into existence and the CIA likely joined in.
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.
With the Internet and some competing heavy-weights, it may no longer be an US soft superpower it was before, but it still retains its important quality: it's ubiquitous, ever-present, and so enormous it's hard to notice - much like fish don't think much about the water they swim in.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204 - June 2023 (332 comments)
Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525366 - June 2020 (7 comments)
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987770 (Feb 2025)
Did John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587547 - Aug 2019 (33 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10462602 (Oct 2015)
Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10116113 - Aug 2015 (133 comments)
I thought this was well known. Like, the Men In Black movies literally have a scene lampshading this.
Art can be a direction shaped with above methods.
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.
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.
[0] https://gmunk.com/Windows-10-Desktop
Some previous discussion:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36155204
Juxtaposed with: https://youtu.be/8adu_rSMdXM?si=GZSeKWodp3ivFZyo
Your tax dollars, hard at work!
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 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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5199568/a-duct-taped-ba...
https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/
> (…) 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.
The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.
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
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
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?
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.