Strangeness

The world is strange.

Exhibit One:

Modern art was CIA 'weapon.'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders, The Independent

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art—including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko—as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince—except that it acted secretly—the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete....

READ ON at independent.co.uk

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Exhibit Two: Strangest internet-flotsam photo seen lately:

(The caption on the site where I came across this was "WTF doesn't begin to describe this pic.")

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Exhibit Three: The Soviets invented Photoshop.

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Exhibit Four: Shoes are now being advertised as "airport friendly" (because they have no metal parts).

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Exhibit Five: Retro-mining is a longstanding tradition in pop music, and every so often a hit comes along that's full of echoes—e.g. "When They Fight, They Fight" by the Generationals, straight out of the '50s. Or remember "Walkin' on the Sun" from 1997? Some artists build whole careers out of it—I remember an unintentionally funny quote by a guy named Lenny Kravitz, who said that guitar was dead—which is true if your thing is ripping off Hendrix licks!

I heard a pleasantly strange variation on the radio in the car last night. Try downloading the song "Witchcraft" by someone called Matt Costa (I know nothing about any of these people, by the bye). I'd heard of acid jazz before...but acid Merseybeat?!

Strange.

Mike
(Thanks to David Emerick and Stan Banos)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Charlie: "Concerning Exhibit 2, the horse peeking out of the hole in the ground was (no surprise) 'shopped in. It's an Internet meme, described in detail here. That article also mentions the woman in the picture, who is a minor Internet star and quasi-meme of her own. By the way—Rocketboom's 'Know Your Meme' site is a great place to check—along with Snopes, of course—when stumbling across Internet weirdness."

Mike replies: Thanks Charlie. Before this past weekend, I didn't even know there were whole sites on the internet devoted to nothing but weird pictures...what next, sites with just gossip about celebrities?!?  :-)

Comments

[Eli Burakian]

What's the big deal? Doesn't everyone have a horse hole in their backyard?

[Keith Loh]

In Soviet Russia, Photoshop clone you!

[Iñaki]

I don´t understand Exhibit 4.
The steel arch, so common on almost every shoe but for trainers, is used mainly to stop your feet from sliding forwards and greatly helps improving your balance and stability when walking.

Actually, I did the bad thing of buying some expensive shoes once [not that shoes are particulary cheap, but they are amazingly complicated products, much much more than expected] which I somehow managed to break that steel arch, and it was a fairly uncomfortable and weird feeling.

That very steel arch has been the reason why most shoes do not use the laces to stabilize the feet but to just tighten the shoes to the feet, as opposed to those 17th century shoes.

[scott]

I alwyas thought Lenny Kravitz stole his riffs from Robin Trower, not so much Jimi Hendrix.

[GF]

Sounds like Annie Leibovitz needs to give the CIA a call for some funding...

[GKFroehlich]

Regarding Exhibit One -- So apparently now that the Soviet Menace is gone, we no longer care what the rest of the world thinks of us culturally, intellectually, or otherwise?

Regarding Exhbit Two -- Wow. "WTF doesn't begin to describe this pic." pretty much says it all.

Regarding Exhibit Three -- Way back when, in graduate school, I did many of the things that PhotoShop does so well today using just such a scanner, 9-track magnetic tapes, etc. I'm betting Ctein did too. And I know NASA and Los Alamos were involved in similar image-processing endeavors. I don't recall when PS came onto the market, but I'm pretty sure our colective efforts preceded PS by WAY more than 3 years!

Regarding Exhibit Four -- Airport-friendly, maybe, but are they Digital Ready?

[Friedrich]

That pic of the chick - I mean the Amputee With An Attitude - I've seen that one before, a few years ago, without the horse. I thought it was pretty amazing of her.

Oh, I see someone has commented on that already. I'll send this comment nonetheless, because I like the rhyme and quasi-alliteration in the opening sentence.

[Robert Roaldi]

If it weren't for the internet, we wouldn't know any of this stuff.

[robert e]

Some time in the nineties, I was listening to a group of music critics on NPR when one brought up a bit of industry jargon in vogue at the time: "Kravitzing", for the act of assembling "new" music out of riffs lifted from other peoples' music of decades past.

[Chad Thompson]

A nice little bolster for exhibit five is Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel Rant. The same chords spanning the centuries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

[Chris Lucianu]

From the essay 'Orientalism and Sinology', in 'The Burning Forest' (1985), by the eminent sinologist Simon Leys:
"One day it will perhaps be discovered that the best studies on Tang poetry and on Song painting have all been financed by the CIA — a fact that should somehow improve the public image of this much-maligned organisation."

The CIA as a patron of Abstract Expressionism: an impish footnote to the Congress for Cultural Freedom brouhaha. Not that anyone who cared wouldn't know. I remember John Kenneth Galbraith attending one event sponsored by the CCF, and expressing shock afterwards — not at the fact of its sponsorship by the CIA. After all, an ideological war was going on, and the attendees were respectable, bona fide intellectuals who actually did have substantial things to say. No, Galbraith, with his considerable bureaucratic experience, was shocked at how easily the money trail could be traced. As he repeated time and again: there are no secrets in the American Republic, there are only varying lengths of time until they are found out.

All things considered, bang-per-buck-wise, perhaps more of the secret funds should be spent on modern art, and less on secret wars.

[matthew langley]

Exhibit One is one of those secrets that's been around for a long time. I learned of it probably in the early nineties. But I guess this now makes it official.

I believe it is also lightly referred to in the book - How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

http://www.amazon.com/How-York-Stole-Idea-Modern/dp/0226310396

It's amazing what a few decades will do to an organization like the CIA.

[Steve Greenwood]

My favorite example of good art (music actually) as anti-soviet propaganda was the Radio Free America jazz hour with the nicotine-voiced Willis Conover as DJ. I still remember listening to those shows on a tube Heathkit shortwave.

Wonderful music by musicians who were not getting invited to the WHite House in those days.

[James]

Strangely, there was a radio programme in the UK a couple of weeks back about a vicious fan-war that broke out in 18th century Europe between fans of two baroque composers, each group accusing the other that one composer was stealing the other's tunes. Damned if I can remember either composer's name, but they got in a couple of modern day musicologists and a modern composer to comment. The upshot was that there's only so much originality around, particularly with the same set of instruments, and some fairly rigid compositional rules, so a certain amount of resampling has to be expected.

Acid Merseybeat has now passed its heyday, at least over here (so my son confidently asserts). I hadn't heard of it, so I doubt I will mourn its passing.

[Mike Johnston]

"Acid Merseybeat has now passed its heyday, at least over here (so my son confidently asserts)."

James,
And I thought I had just invented that term. Which only goes to underscore your point.

Mike

[James]

Sons, eh. The teenage tyke is with his mother until the weekend, which gives me more than enough time to invent a whole series of detailed questions about said Acid Merseybeat. I'll enjoy the floundering answers! And after that, he's sweeping up leaves for an hour or so.

That said, I do remember Merseybeat...

[Ben Rosengart]

I've known about the CIA's involvement with modern art ever since I read _Who Paid The Piper?_ a few years ago. Wait, hey, the author of the article is also the author of that book. So which part of this is news, exactly?

[B Small]

#4 strikes me more as it's about time rather than strange. Now if I could get a decent belt with a plastic buckle I'd be set.

[RobG]

Exhibit 1 - if the CIA's saying they did it, can they be trusted to tell the truth?

Exibit 2 - she's cute, despite the prosthestic.

Exhibit 3 - hmm... don't believe everything you read on the internet (see Ex 1) ;)

Exhibit 4 - I have a pair of safety boots with a non-steel toe cap. Most comfortable work boots I've ever owned. To echo B Small - what took so long?

Exhibit 5 - there's only so many notes and so many ways to arrange them. I recall an SF short story from the 60s (?) about just that same thing, how the passing of a perpetual copyright bill had stifled art and music. AcidMerseybeat sounds... interesting. I'll have to dig some up.

[Shahar Dumai]

Re Exhibit 3... in 1987, computer enthusiasts' Byte Magazine published an article on digital imaging (see the cover:
http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/images/Byte1987b.jpg)
The article described researchers who loaned a digital camera (!) from NASA, took a picture of the Mona Lisa, studied visible spectrometry of similar-age varnishes, and tried to simulate on-screen how the painting original looked like. Fascinated, it looked to me as pure science fiction.
I REALLY wanted a digital camera after reading that article. My Amiga computer was already capable of changing color ranges of digital pictures, waiting just for the digital camera to complete the system.

It took about 16 years but eventually I also had one! not sure though how long it would take my beloved Amiga 1000 to process those NEFs...

[ObiJohn]

Who comes up with this stuff??!!