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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- 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 - 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 - 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
- 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).
by ivan_gammel