Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I feel like absolutely everything is a PsyOp. I mean look at how many big cities there are around the world, how many millions of people working in office buildings; every single day; thinking, crafting emails, organizing events, coordinating, writing up marketing, creating PowerPoint slides, filling out Excel sheets, writing up reports, writing up project briefs... Millions of brains and machines manipulating information.
I would be surprised if there's anything which is of any interest to any meaningful group of humans which is not a PsyOp.
by jongjong - "Coffee break is over, stop thinking and get back to work."by indy
- Hah! Nothing new;
"All Art is Propaganda" is a well known quote by various authors - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/04/08/art-propaganda/
Also George Orwell wrote a set of essays under that name (though he was primarily indicating Language/Literature) - https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays
by rramadass - What you observe, elevate, worship is the same thing. The modern culture want you to worship individuality, expression, pleasure, etc.
The result is the destruction of society, of the building blocks, what remain is atomic individuals and a central power structure that always control more and centralise.
Our roots was to worship Christ (self sacrifice for love and truth) with that sweept aside, we worship pleasure, ourselves, the intellect, etc. We are much easier to control than stuborn truth believer that are ready to die for it.
by alfor - Related. Others?
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)
by dang - 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.
by jychang - 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:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-are-monumentally-ba...
by mauvehaus - Maybe that is why realism is chased so much in video games in the west, while eastern countries rarely are interested.by OroPla
- 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!by wincy
- When I grew up in Soviet Union we heard "political" jokes and also heard that they were written by CIA. It was not generally believed to be true. Even mocked later, like "You think Soviets could not come up with jokes on their own?"
But now I started to think this could be true to certain extent. There were collections of such jokes printed abroad and smuggled into USSR. This does not mean they were printed by CIA, of course. But there is also tone of those jokes.
They were not the kind of jokes that point out something like low quality of goods or services (Reagan retold a few of these; such jokes were widespread and absolutely legal, there were numerous official satirical magazines that had them in spades). These was, for example, a series of jokes about a certain Civil war figure. There was a movie about him ("Chapaev", last name) that was immensely popular in USSR. In the series of jokes he and his comrades appeared as the filthiest and stupidiest scoundrels. There also was a serie of jokes about "War and Peace" figures (Rostova, Bolkonsky, etc.), with exactly same approach.
What started that process was a rather dull and artificial joke that turned out to mock an end scene of some war movie. I somehow missed that movie in my youth, but I knew the title of it, the movie and the book it was based on were well known. But once I saw it I clearly saw that the joke was meant to mock the movie; there is no other explanation.
Thing is, the scene should not be mocked. William James wrote that a characteristic quality of a religious experience was a feeling of seriousness; "not all is vanity". This feeling was very alive in USSR, even though it was a formally atheist country. We clearly understood that as kids. Not because you will be punished, mind you, but because this will harm you.
With that understanding I reevaluated the other jokes and indeed the intent was same. I also remembered certain songs that also appeared about that time; they were called "emigrant songs" and, apparently, they were recorded in Russian neigbourhoods of New York. They were in fantastically bad taste; yet they were everywhere.
Bad taste and bad jokes don't need CIA; but now I think CIA indeed played a part by giving all that a much bugger scale that might have happened organically.
- 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.by mikert89
- I think the first time that was brought to my attention was one of our host's essays: The Submarine.by Tangurena2
- 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.
- 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.
by notarobot123 - 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.
by pkul - Old news. Modern art is Antiart made to destroy European culture and replace it for the global debauchery of Americana. Harmful to the soul, void of talent, turning western civilization from master painters to banana + duct tape.
EDIT: Saachi works similar to the way boy and girl bands are created. They are not artists, but underpaid unknowns whose works are packaged, productized, propped up, marketed and sold like Kpop idols. It’s a machine.
by MachineMan - Agree. I felt like I wasn't interested in art. I just didn't like it. Turns out, it's not a "me" problem, it's an "art" problem. Once I got involved in the furry community I discovered how beautiful art can be. My whole house is full of furry artworks, and I'm commissioning more. Those artists create things that are fun, novel, original. As opposed to "abstract New York no. 41715".
But the deeper problem is that an average consumer simply doesn't care about quality. Look at how most people listen to the music - random radio with same 10 pop songs over and over again with ads in-between, while being stuck in traffic. They're not experiencing music, they just want something to fill the void and that's it.
by anal_reactor - This is nonsense.
Modern art is modern art because by the early 20th century, it was hard to do anything original in something resembling a traditional style.
It is the same reason for serial/12 tone music.
Arnold Schoenberg wasn't a psyop. If anything it is a comment on the lack of modern cultural sophistication and the way people relate to the world in terms of sensationalist narrative for click optimization.
by polnoner - A banana taped to the wall is a deeper and more profound art commentary than yours.by wewxjfq
- The "banana taped to a wall" tendency in art began in Europe, with Dadaism. But I think you're half right, in that it was a clear reaction to the destruction of Europe (by itself, in the first World War).by phainopepla2
- Yours is a good take but the duct taping of the banana was done by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.by gizajob
- Maybe it's just semantics but:
I wouldn't use the nomer americana which is a grouping of styles itself becoming less comon.
Secondly I wouldn't ascribe intentionality to all if it. That's what made it so dangerous and imo destructive. It self-propagates. I saw people in the arts in turn instilling the idea that all these modern greats in some slightly different way pushed the boundaries with their slightly new thing and for that we should remember their name. To be avant garde was a quality in and of itself. The only quality. And it happened to diminish the need for certain skills. Understanding the origins, ideas, etc happened to become a form of social signaling. (this kind of art thoughtleader is typically not ascribed to a poor person detached from artistic cricles after all)
Barely a soul seemed to think there was something to the kind of expressive qualities we sought for thousands of years might have intrinsic value that was not derived from further abstracting things down or meaning that had to be taped on to be understood,, etc.
And so I saw so many people chasing their ego to either be different in ironically the same ways or mostly to just roll with the style du jour all without any kind of self reflection.
Also funilly enough I remember seeing an architect or 2 baffled that people liked certain classical styles because they were thought how these "incorrectly" took from previous even older styles. As if nobody could deconstruct their cubic creations in the same way.
by modo_mario - Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were Europeans, and Europe is where art speculation and the "Art Market" was born, and where Art History became equated with Art Market History. Americans showed up with a 20 year lag and kept lagging, with e.g. Pollock imitating Picasso in the 1940s. By then, globally-viral-Picasso was selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of inflation adjusted dollars.by mondrian
- Most of greatest works of modern art are European. The term “modern art” is in reference to an era that we are no longer in.
You have a strong opinion. I would highly implore you to learn more about art history and why art is the way it is today. You’ll learn why banana and duct tape is why it is.
What makes an art work museum worthy? It’s very rewarding to have that insight.
by jonnybgood - A lot of people are confused by the term "modern art" in this.
This isn't meant to be about the idea of modern art in general, not about modernist art, or a "history of art" compatible conception of the term.
So whether "modern art started with the invention of the film camera" and other such claims about the late 19th here is irrelevant.
In the context of TFA and the CIA-related discussion, "modern art" refers mainly to abstract expressionism and to a lesser degree pop art and conceptual art, in US and Western Europe.
That was the scene and its sub-scenes which dominated the Western galleries and art world in the post "cold" war period, and for layman uses (and even for several critical treatments), it was synonymous with modern art, in the sense of the fine arts, in general. Hence the use of the term.
That's the way the term "modern art" is used in this.
by coldtea - 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.
by gizajob - "the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"
Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).
by nemo - Art became an investment and artistic properties ceased to matter.
- Literally the best possible kind of psy-op. Same with translating Sesame Street and distributing it to 100s of countries. Same with countries like Thailand exporting Thai food. It's a psy op based on what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world, our country would grow in prestige and soft power. And these strategies are usually pretty effective, not to mention usually net-positive for all sides ... compared with so many other horibble harms US and other countries foreign offices have done around the world out of self interest.by tpurves
- > what if we took nice things from our country and subsidized distributing them to the rest of the world
Or the appearance of nice things. Consider the suburb as promoted by American film which has left a very deep mark on the global imagination and that, regrettably, maintains a strong influence over housing markets and urban planning to this day.
by lo_zamoyski