Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
20151030
Modern art was CIA 'weapon'
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
20140110
20130511
Public Installation of Startling Statistics
'american kills' by chilean-born new york based artist sebastian errazuriz is a public installation showcasing the suicide rates of US soldiers. after searching on official war sites on the internet, he accidentally found out that 2 times more american soldiers had died in 2009 by committing suicide than those killed during that same year in the war in iraq; an alarming comparison that errazuriz had personally never read or heard about before.
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/public-installation-of
20120312
20120219
20111126
20111101
20111027
20110821
20110808
20110726
URGENT!! Sentinels of Liberty!
Alternative Title: Captain America Recruits Scavenging Americans To Fight The Unholy Japs.
20110713
20110711
20110709
20110703
20110702
A Short Vision (1956)
via youtube.com
This short animated film is Peter and Joan Foldes' second and last film together. Its bleak subject - the end of the world caused by a nuclear apocalypse - reflects a widespread preoccupation in 50s Britain which would soon lead to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
20110626
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)