the Butler did it (was cheap computers)

[Jim heartfield]

In message <XFMail.990102133731.cgrimes at tsoft.com>, Chuck Grimes
<cgrimes at tsoft.com> writes
>
>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.

I think this is quite well documented, unlike the second gunman. The CIA
funded abstract expressionism, as a counterweight to socialist realism.
Greenberg was one of those Cold War liberals who was allotted the task
of promoting this indigenous American modernism.

I don't say that abstract expressionism was necessarily bad for that
reason (though in my opinion it was a fairly retrograde movement) but it
was indeed sponsored by the CIA. Care to tell me otherwise?
-- 
Jim heartfield