‘The World Ain’t Run by No Magical Forces’

“Possibly the most WTF viral video since the Christian Side-Hug” (Egregores).

How the CIA Turned Abstract Art into Official High Culture

How did Abstract Expressionism come to dominate the mid-20th-century art scene?

Partly because the Central Intelligence Agency paid for it—all part of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Abstract or non-representational art was also being produced in the early years of the USSR, during the early 1920s. Then Joseph Stalin, still the champion mass-murderer of all time, took power in 1924 and controlled the USSR until his death in 1953.

Under Stalin, all art, literature, film-making, etc., had either to serve the state as propaganda or at least express “safe” sentiments. Nothing experimental or critical was allowed—which is why, for example, a satirical novel of the 1930s, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, could not be published until the 1960s, after Stalin’s death, when the USSR was under the somewhat more moderate leadership of Nikita Khruschchev.

How better then, in the struggle for world opinion between the USSR and “the West,” to show that in the West artists could be experimental, critical, unrestricted, and free than to showcase the works of Abstract Expressionists?

(See Technoccult for a photo of abstract painter Jackson Pollack at work.)

Never mind if popular taste rejected abstraction in the West as well, the propaganda war was more important.

In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art”, with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting [President Harry] Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: “I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” The tour had to be cancelled.

The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Fake CIA-sponsored foundations funded art shows and traveling exhibitions. Museums, galleries, and events received secret subsidies. All the machinery of Big Money and High Art was set in motion to promote Abstract Expressionism.

Writer Frances Stonor Saunders asks,

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.

But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

Liking this kind of art became a marker of hipness and  cultural sophistication. As a recent New York Times article on “The Sociology of the Hipster” notes,

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Renaissance painters worked for princes and cardinals. Abstract Expressions, although they may not have realized it, also served the power structure of their time.

An afterthought on jazz: It would not surprise me to learn that American jazz musicians received much the same kind of Cold War subsidies from the CIA. After all, jazz was avant-garde, and the presence of many Negro musicians—to use the favored racial term of the 1950s and ’60s—presented a happy multiracial picture of America, ammunition against Communist attacks on race relations here.

Can the decline in modern jazz music in recent decades be linked to the end of the Cold War?

Danish Debate: Bare Breasts or Bacon?

Members of two Danish political parties differ over whether including scenes of nude (or at least topless) beach-goers in an informative film about Denmark  would discourage fundamentalist Muslims from trying to immigrate.

“Bare breasts are not a protection against fundamentalism,” [Conservative Integration Spokesman Naser] Khader says on his Facebook page.

“Quite on the contrary. Fundamentalists [are] so sex crazy that bare breasts would make them flock to the country. Perhaps one should try naked pigs and pork— that’ll keep them away…” Khader says.

Add this to your file on “embodied religion,” maybe.

The Dream Philosophical Academy

Three night ago, I was dreaming that someone was lecturing on some sort of gnostic philosophy. “Gnostic” was the term used in the dream, although it might not have been appropriate.

The lecturer drew a distinction between the Pagan view of “remembering” the soul’s perfection, versus a Christian approach of attempting to become more and more perfect.

The former, at least, seems like fairly mainstream Platonic teaching.

All this was followed by a very cinematic dream about a young man returning by train to his home town in Wyoming. Since Amtrak does not serve Wyoming, and since it seemed that through CGI that the Wind River Range had been moved closer to the town, it was clear that I was dreaming.

The way I figure it, I had just joined the Association for the Study of Esotericism because of some new projects that I am pursuing, and they were just getting my coordinates into their dream-projector.

The CIA, UFOs, Fairies, etc.

I am reading Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Pyschological Warfare, and UFOs, by Mark Pilkington. (There is a related documentary film.)

Small disclaimer: I met Mark Pilkington a few years ago in England. We did not talk about UFOs nor about the fact that he was one of the people making crop circles for “cereologists” to get all cranked up about.

I have not yet finished the book, but one of its these seems to be that a lot of the UFO material out there is deliberate disinformation by various intelligence agencies.

Why? Consider this scenario, which happened various times in the past: Military radar operators report suspicious “returns” over an airbase. Fighter aircraft are scrambled to intercept the intruders. Once airborne, however, the pilots cannot find the intruders. Must be technologically advanced UFOs!

This means that (a) alien beings have crossed the galaxy in order to play games with our radar operators, or (b) someone here on Earth is working on ways to “spoof” radar signals in order to confuse potential enemies and cause them to fly around looking for intruders that are not there—while, presumably, the real attacker sneaks in undetected.

Occam’s Razor: They sell them in 12-packs at Walgreens and Boots the Chemist.

Why would intelligence agencies feed deliberate misinformation to the public at large and to UFO “researchers” in particular? Some possible reasons:

1. During the Cold War, to baffle the Soviet Union and divert their military from #2, below.

2. To create a belief in “UFOs” that in turn camouflages actual experiments in spy planes, “stealth” technology, drone aircraft, and other secret research.

Create an image and a predisposition, and people will see what they expect to see.

3. To conduct experiments in disinformation in a controlled way: for example, how long does it take a particular piece of “disinformation” to become broadly accepted and by what channels is it disseminated? The whole “Majestic 12” hoax might be an example. Or “cattle mutilations,” or what you will. A lot of Pilkington’s book is devoted to tracing some of these pathways of disinformation.

What about Fairies?

If alien races did arrive here, they probably would not step out of  mechanical “flying saucers” wearing silver coveralls. Anyone who could conquer the whole issue of traveling faster than the speed of light would likely be so advanced that we not even perceive them.

To use a metaphor from the book, do the goldfish in the bowl know that someone is watching them swim around?

All talk of UFOs aside, I do tend to think that there are other beings who share our space, in a manner of speaking.

They have been here all along. They appear in various forms. They are not necessarily our friends. (Which is why the whole phenomenon of “fairy festivals” makes me feel a little queasy.) Lots of weirdness.

Mix them up with your favorite intelligence agency, and watch out!

Another facet of Mirage Men that I appreciate is that it shows how investigating forms of paranormal (or perceived paranormal) activity can have unsettling effects on the investigator. Rampant paranoia is just part of it.

The classic work, to my mind, on this phenomenon is John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, published in 1975.  (Ignore the 2002 movie, please, unless you have to watch everything that Richard Gere ever did.)

What is interesting is not whether “Mothman” exists or not, but what happens to Keel and his associates when they begin to investigate it. Talk about having one foot on the Other Side! (Or are they victims of disinformation too? More paranoia …)

It reminded me of the summer when a newspaper reporter friend, a lodge of wannabe ceremonial magicians, and I decided to investigate the so-called cattle mutilations. Things went downhill into weirdness fairly quickly.

I published the story in Fate (“Mutilation Madness.” Fate June 1988: 60-70), but this was back in the pre-digital 1980s, so there is nothing to link to. Sorry.

One last quote from Mirage Men that more or less summarizes it:

The UFO scene is overrun with whistleblowers who regale us with tales of underground bases and intergalactic pacts while waving impressive-looking documents around as evidence. To the believers these people are clearly on the side of ufology and are to be welcomes. That the role of [the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations] and other agencies in distributing this same material has been public knowledge for twenty years seems not to have sunk in. Meanwhile, those insiders who suggest that the UFO phenomenon is a complex brew of security, secrecy, psychology, sociology, politics, and folklore, perhaps driven by rare but genuinely anomalous events, are obviously part of the cover-up.

Agora: It’s a Riot

I finally watched Agora on DVD last night. It’s one rioting mob after another interspersed with astronomy lessons.

You have your Pagan mob, your Jewish mob, your Christian mob(s). A Muslim mob would have fit right in, but had not yet been invented.

And did Hypatia really discover that planetary orbits were elliptical, not perfect Platonic circles? No. It was the sort of issue that would have engaged her interest, however.

Here is the historical part: There was a Pagan neoplatonic philosopher-teacher in 5th-century Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of an intellectual father, who was murdered by a sort of Christian Taliban.

There was a Roman prefect (governor) named Orestes and a fanatical monk named Ammonius. And Mullah Bishop Cyril, of course.

And the rest is movie-making. (Military historians will note that the Roman soldiers look more like the 1st century CE than the 5th.)  For more on the actual Hyptia—and on the movie version—visit Egregores.

UPDATE: See also Kallisti’s review with its “motivational poster.“

The Positive Power of Poisons

Via Instapundit, a Popular Mechanics round up on medical possibilities of venoms and poisons.

I can’t say that my 2006 rattlesnake bite had any positive physiological effects, but I can tell you that a sting from the little tan scorpions that we have in southern Colorado (same as this?) can have interesting effects on the central nervous system—once you get past the pain. I understand that some people grind and smoke them, but I have not tried that.

Did Isaac Bonewits Influence You?

That is the question that William Seligman is asking (with permission) on his blog.

If your Pagan practice and experience were influenced by Isaac, go visit and add your input.

The Pagan Studies Samhain

Our little celebration here at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, during which we Pagan scholars and friends discard our tweed jackets and switch to Samhain black, made it to The Huffington Post.  (Scroll to the bottom.) Thanks, Grove, I think.

It’s another example of how Wicca, in particular, is becoming the new Other in the religious landscape, elbowing aside the Jews, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone else who fills the blank of, “But how will the _________  react?”

Keeping Up with Buffy Studies

Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer has now been released by McFarland.

Essays describe how Buffy can be used to explain—and encourage further discussion of—television’s narrative complexity, archetypal characters, morality, feminism, identity, ethics, non-verbal communication, film production, media and culture, censorship, and Shakespeare, among other topics.

Jason Winslade, a scholar in Pagan studies (via performance studies) and a contributor to the volume, notes, “I used the show first in my occultism and pop culture course at DePaul, back when I first published about Buffy in 2001, then wound up doing an entire class on the show as a popular freshman seminar for several years. “