Modern Art and the Esteem Machine: How Picasso finally took off in America

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/modern-art-and-the-esteem-machine-hugh-eakin-picassos-war

by hoffmannesque • 4 years ago

20 2 4 years ago

lioeters2• 4 years ago

Hearing the term "modern art", I can help but recall:

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.
[The agency] fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...

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And how weird it is that, before the Cold War, "modern art" was a focus of cultural conflict in Germany.

Degenerate art (German: Entartete Kunst) was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art.
During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature.
Degenerate Art also was the title of an exhibition, held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937, consisting of 650 modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

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It makes me wonder, after the Cold War (well, now a kind of hot one) - what aspects of modern culture are being weaponized and used in a "culture war".

lioeters2• 4 years ago

From the posted article, this sentence stands out as representative of the power of modern art to disrupt cultural values.

When modern art was attacked for undermining American values — the Times called the Armory Show "part of the general movement, discernible all over the world, to disrupt and degrade, if not to destroy, not only art, but literature and society, too" — Quinn worked the press, giving interviews to New York papers in which he labelled unsigned attacks like that one "Ku Klux criticism."

Modern Art and the Esteem Machine: How Picasso finally took off in America

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