https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/1bpaiae/shoot_um_moma_what_is_this/
Rothko's Untitled. I don't like abstract expressionism but he's probably the technical height of it from how much work actually went into that.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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fuck the cia fuck all their artists and fuck defending this garbage.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
It’s really funny whenever this is brought up. Like okay, the cia tried pushing a bunch of dumb art styles. Who cares? What effect did they have on society? Some big canvas with a black square on it has done 0 damage on the world compared to the countless war and crime movies normalizing brutalization against the “undesirables.”
Oh boo hoo some asshole laundered his money with a Picasso. Who gives a shit. They launder much more through shell companies and tax loopholes. Stop crying. I don’t see you deleting your social media and touching grass since the feds invented the internet and infiltrate everything.
Or better yet, if you seethe over dumb abstract art because MUH CIA!!! then I better see you seething over jazz music and punk rock for being devil imperialist music since they diverted from the norms
uh i'm not here to rag on the cia for crimes against culture, i'm here to rag on the "art community" being so up their own ass that they lost the ability to summarily dismiss worthless meaningless garbage for being worthless meaningless garbage. bringing up the cia part of it is to discredit the "movement".
Most Abstract art is literally just a niche for rich people. No one cares about it beyond some millionaires. You don’t hear the end about the classical painters because that’s what society has declared to be Good Art. The “discourse” surrounding abstract, avant-garde crap is just between people who sip wine all day whose opinions are virtually worthless and silly, but what’s even more Silly is getting your pants in a knot over some imaginary movement and “defense” no one cares about
i considered and then declined to edit my previous comment to add something about the absurdity of comparing the bougiest bourgeois art with jazz and punk.
art heads defend it and try to legitimize it. there are comments on this post complaining about allegedly reactionary left pushback against the bullshit.
also that's "movement" in the art movement sense, not like, the peoples front of whatever
Again, “art heads” is just some random niche group. Society doesn’t care about abstract, modern art and it’s often the butt of jokes for most people. Getting upset because some guy thinks abstract art is “real art” because you think it’s “meaningless” is pointless because you’re just acting like it’s some widespread phenomenon. I hate most modern art but I don’t think that’s a reactionary stance unlike literally getting upset over a picture of a square because it’s “not real art”
i spend approximately zero minutes of my life thinking about it outside of a day or two every few years when someone else brings it up. the rest is just refusing to come to bed because someone is wrong on the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What you think is "society" was actually art traders and rich people from hundreds of years ago, as opposed to less than a hundred years ago. Doesn't mean that the works and the artists should be dismissed because of the material conditions of the time, but rather taken into account when appreciating said art.
The person im replying to suggests the need to “push back” against a supposed “movement” or mass defense of abstract art. I’m not trashing on traditional art, just saying that it “pushing back” against abstract art is entirely pointless because society doesn’t care about it enough for it be meaningful in any way.
The incident like twenty years ago where someone discovered a "lost" Pollock painting and there were heated arguments between historians over whether it was a fake was so funny to me. I don't have any background in art history myself so take this with a grain of salt, but when I looked at it I saw a bunch of paint splotches, which leads me to believe it was authentic.
yeah i have no idea how you could "verify" an unprovenanced pollock
You can do analysis of the materials and the techniques and try to pinpoint it on the timeline or his career. From what I gather, it’s a subjective practice which uses objective instruments.
According to the article you linked, the artists weren’t aware that the CIA was using them
They weren't aware, that's correct. I cannot fucking stand the online reactionary stance on modern art I see from leftists; abstract expressionism was promoted by the west strictly because it was the opposite of the official Soviet line on art, which was socialist realism, not because of the ideological content of the art itself. It's beyond intellectually lazy to be opposed to abstract art because of that.
Standing in front of a Mark Rothko painting was almost a fucking spiritual experience for me, not because of the capitalist messages hidden inside but because of the depth of color and texture that fills the perception
It’s not a hard sentence to understand. I guess this is your first time encountering someone who likes art that you don’t like
there's different tastes and then there's what you said. I don't like coffee, but it's comprehensible to me that someone would.
have you ever tried DMT?
no, but if I took it and looked at some garbage and felt something i'd attribute it to the drug, not the object.
New tagline dropped
Reinventing the concept of d*generate art but making it leftist this time
Edit: Slur filter broke the wikipedia link. But you can find it if you search “d*generate art”
Thinking that because the CIA did something it was smart and effective, they do a tonneau of dumb silly shit thst goes no where.
Isn't it also largely because the early CIA/OSS was populated largely by Ivy Leaguers, with the associated cultural norms and biases?
having your work promoted because the cia likes it doesn't seem enough different to me than the cia commissioning stuff.
didnt they also fund writers and "show don't tell" came from the cia?
the key word in "American Abstract Expressionist" is American, the content was unimportant beyond 'not explicitly pro-soviet'. Abstract art is not reactionary or garbage