the CIA, arts, and a Whitney Museum touring exhibition, 2002

The most common objection people have to our research: "Too many people would have been involved to pull off such a massive hoax." Well, with trillions of taxpayers' dollars at hand, this operation could certainly afford contracting many individuals (under a gag order and on a need-to-know basis). Meet the real - and unreal - persons, companies & entities assigned to carry out this gigantic, media & military-assisted psyop.
nonhocapito
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the CIA, arts, and a Whitney Museum touring exhibition, 2002

Unread post by nonhocapito »

RIght after 9/11, a huge modern art exhibition started touring around Europe. It featured Pop-art artists, Abstract Expressionists and other currents of the twentieth century and it was organized by the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. It was called "New York Renaissance" in Italy, elsewhere I believe "An American Legacy. A gift to New York".

http://www.mondomostre.it/en/mostre/ita ... in-mostra/
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/5470509
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/162 ... o_New_York

Only long after the fact I realized that this exhibition was actually a well-designed, post-9/11 momentous tool of propaganda, to mobilize intellectuals and educated people on the side of the United States in a number of nations where intellectuals usually were on the opposite side, but nonetheless sensitive to symbols of American freedom and dissent. The results, on the wave of the 9/11 I believe were significant, and I remember even yours truly, back then even more naive than today, visiting this exhibition and being impressed with the striking contrast between such diverse art forms and the monotony and pointlessness of "terrorist acts".

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It is a known fact that the CIA was involved in the promotion of American Modern arts, just as much as they were and are in control of the music business.
Some sources on the connection between Abstract Expressionists and the CIA:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201610 ... of-the-cia
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 78808.html
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/ ... ular-front
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-1 ... war-weapon

These articles will tell you about the need the U.S. had, during the "cold war", to show the independence and freedom of western art, in order not to lose intellectual assets to the other side.

This can be accepted, on a superficial level, but I believe something deeper was at play. The U.S. could not compete with the old world control of the cultural world, especially when it came to the heritage of Classical music and Fine Arts. So they had to disrupt this world radically, in order to gain control of it. Initiatives like the Venice biennale and other contemporary arts exhibitions played an important role in making these new forms of art just as important if not more important than the old ones.

There could also have been the added need to lower the bar on what art really was, so that new forms of aggressive propaganda could fit in. That's where "abstract expressionism" and the so called "pop-art" and (CIA asset?) Andy Wahrol come into play.

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It turned out this was "art". From http://www.newyorkartworld.com/commenta ... Flags.html

Of course, fine arts have always been used for propaganda, so what we are describing here is just a transition of focus from the old world propaganda to the new world propaganda.

But there is an additional point to be made: European art at the beginning of the twentieth century was freeing itself from propaganda and focusing on the principles of art. Impressionists and post impressionists like Monet and Cezanne gave as much importance to the apples as to the nose of the king.

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The above: NOT propaganda.

In my opinion, this event was dramatically more revolutionary and emancipating that anything that had happened in arts until then. Suddenly the artist was not there to serve his masters, but just to explore the principles and mysteries of the art form. This could not really be tolerated, for the simple reason that a painting dense with propaganda and mind-control intentions will always look weak in comparison to something created by an artist of independent mind and with strong ethical principles.

Directions in which this thread might go:
* the different forms of art that have been hijacked by the CIA
* how contemporary arts today still play a minor role in the establishing of a form of propaganda that has to make sure "everything" can be art, so that a disaffection with art and other forms of authentic creativity and emancipation is guaranteed.
* the Whitney Museum and the people behind this exhibition (Dana Miller, Marla Prather, and then director of the museum, Maxwell Anderson)
etc