Ruphus -> RE: Signs of Neanderthals mating with humans (Mar. 9 2011 8:42:22)
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Thank you, Stephen, for your thoughts and hints. The teacher of the 19th century European art history you describe, reminds of the one I had in behavioural science, only that she was horrible in didactics. She grilled me badly for not reflecting her female appeal. I belong to those "ignorants" who can distinguish between clumsyness and proficiency; and I am totally convinced that there would be much more differenciation around, if people had a notion of unrelated interferences that shaped contemporary arbitrariness under an actually discerning term like "art". Before all students of art and art history should be provided with such crucial information; as without it they´d be left merely to symptoms without a hold on causa. Here a NY-Times article on the background in question: quote:
Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington's foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow. ... The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy. An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov's much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer. The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow. Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation. "We couldn't spend it all," Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. "There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing." When some of the C.I.A.'s activities were exposed in the late 1960's, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.'s role. "She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened," said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950's and early 1960's. "And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations." Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.'s cultural activities, argue that the agency's role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. "It enabled people to publish what they already believed," he added. "It didn't change anyone's course of action or thought." But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency's front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message. "Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government," said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. "And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously." What is left out in this discription of the New York Times is how preferably and explicitely untalented people were selected who had never thought of artwork before, but were merely lucky to be familiar or related with corresponding CIA agents and from there came to a living as millionaires without qualification of any sort. If you research you will find the info about it. All their works are high price "art" today and substantially shaped what is being modern art since, which means actually anything, nothing, but merely corresponding people at hand to sell and generate brands. Completely independendly of performance. Many of thelike "artists" finally went to the utmost and provoked reveal of the granted selling principle and cynism with anything from greased bathtubs to holes in the ground ( Beuys that you mentioned ), but the image industry reached indestructibility and went on inflating the conception of artistry to infinity. Meanwhile the unskilled market fraction outstripped the classical works in pricing. - Besides, I had a similar museum visit like you with a nice of mine, only with swapped roles. It was Francis Bakon´s clumsy scrawls in a museum in Munich, and I couldn´t resist to leave a corresponding remark in the guest book, which again got her really heated in her precocious premisse of: "Millions of flies can´t be erring; eat sh!t people!", as I name it. Stuffed with painting skills herself ( far above those of Bakon )/ basically capable of seeing lack of control on the brush, yet she couldn´t withdraw from common sense. What hangs in a museum, adored and highly priced can´t be clumsy. And the artist´s woesome vita got to be a PC background for appreciation at the latest. Ruphus
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