I just read that Louis Proyect is going to post something on AE, the CIA, and so on. And this from Jim Heartfield:
"I remember reading that Greenberg, a one-time Trotskyist, was, like many proponents of the abstract expressionist movement sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency, in its ongoing struggle against 'soviet-inspired' socialist realism. One of the more curious chapters in the history of the Cold War."
So, Tom Wolfe in the _Painted Word_ claimed AE was nothing more than Peggy Guggenheim's money buying a place in art history for New York City. And now there is the CIA-plot theory of art. Starts to sound like the second gunman on the grassy knoll syndrome.
Jesus, guys. On the other hand, why not blame it all on guns and money. But these dated theories in a sense illustrate something about the historical-cultural context that art lives with. Since the advanced bourgeois no longer understand or care about the arts, that leaves the arts to be explained. Why do they even exist? Well, see money and guns, or those other favorites, sex and drugs. So,it is all about guns, money, sex and drugs. What is really amazing is that art is all about that and is interpenetrated with all of that, as is just about every other domain of our culture.
Ah, that's why they call it Art, see?
Art is the perfect whore. You can do anything you want to her. Dress her up, dress her down, slap her around, worship her, fuck her, kiss her, or tie her up and stuff her in the closet, drag her out for company, hide her from the kids, or make the kids look at her over and over, make her the company spokesman, sell her to the foreign competition, stand behind her in a shoot out. You can even clone her and claim that she is all new and different now that we have computers and can pass her around faster than convicts can turn out a newbie.
None of that matters in the slightest, because it isn't art that is revealed through any one of these turn arounds at all.
Chuck Grimes