Colin Marshall – Open Culture Oct 27, 2025
What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. I grant, as an American myself, that such humor surrounds at least a grain of truth. But there was a time when the federal government of the U.S., an organization not often accused of excessive high-mindedness, took an active role in promoting the country’s home-grown avant-garde — an appropriate term, notes Lucie Levine at JSTOR Daily, since it “began as a French military term to describe vanguard troops advancing into battle,” and American modern art had become a continuation of politics by other means.
“Up until World War II, America had never produced large, influential art movements like in Europe,” says the narrator of the Conspiracy of Art video above. After the war, “something unexpected happened: a brood of radical American painters helped make New York City the center of the art world.”
Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock: they and other artists “captured the world’s attention with large-scale works of pure color and form.” This movement came to be known as abstract expressionism, and in the eyes of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency, it came to show promise as propaganda. If shown abroad, it could function as propaganda, highlighting “the differences between American and Soviet politics” — and more specifically, “the appeal of American culture over Soviet Culture.”
“Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War?” asks the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. While Pollock was indeed promoted abroad with CIA money (usually provided through layers of organizational misdirection), you don’t look at a painting like Lavender Mist and “think about ‘artistic free enterprise’ or the CIA, or the cultural politics of Partisan Review. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing.” But its “importance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing.” It’s also worth asking, should the United States once again find itself face-to-face with a formidable political and cultural adversary, whether it will be prepared to draft a few Pollocks back into service.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook
Art maybe, but literature, be that magazines, or fiction, and of course, Hollywood, fake history and lies, and Donald Hitler is into this in a big way, and so is Nazi UK, with Nazi UKrainian troops marching in London, when Nazi UKraine was aligned with Adolf Hitler, before and during WW2. This kinda closes the circle.
One of the biggest mind fecks of recent times, is JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, which really did end logical enquiry with magik. Those wizards at MI6, and their writing pool.
Jews always have to cover their tracks with false accusations: we know, of course, that Modern Art and Architecture are a Jewish attack on White Man culture, and the fact that they touted African monstrosities in sculpture helps to prove the point
I can’t understand why security agencies believe the minds of millions are so malleable and easy to control. If they were then propaganda wouldn’t be necessary and commerce would have already captured those techniques decades before the security agencies woke up to them, because we’d all have housefuls of crap we never used but just had to buy.
They may be able to turn the minds of those who are its captives in black hole dungeons, plied with mind-altering drugs and further broken with white noise and other intolerable living conditions. But how they can then extrapolate a few poor broken souls into suddenly becoming billions of broken souls using sh!tty art and music etc, it is they who are of a suspect mind and could themselves be classed as cuckoo.
Care home resident, 97, ‘arrested’ on her birthday
Story by Lynn Rusk -year-old care resident known for her mischievous streak was “placed under arrest” on her birthday as part of a surprise planned by staff.
Maggie Clarke, a former children’s nurse and resident of Elizabeth Lodge in Enfield, London, had joked with staff that she had always wondered what it would be like to be arrested.
To mark Mrs Clarke’s birthday, the care home team got in touch with local Metropolitan Police officers who volunteered to take part in the surprise.
On the morning of her birthday, officers from Wood Green Police Station arrived at Elizabeth Lodge with a set of handcuffs and a spoof arrest warrant.
Mrs Clarke gleefully put her hands together and smiled for the cameras as Pc Benjamin Flint “arrested” her.
She was charged on the grounds of consistent speeding in her wheelchair.
Wow, Jackson Pollock, the CIA and bronze statues of fat women in the USA, all in the same day! I hope this trend continues.
– Oh, say, isn’t Jackson Pollock’s “Yellow Islands” such a mesmerizing metaphorical depiction of the brutality of the war in the Pacific?
– Er, no, actually, it’s not. It’s a completely haphazard and inept slinging of paint splashes across an ego-sized canvas. Cobwebs have greater aesthetic value.
Pollock is just inferior Cod. There’s an elephant, on YouTube, called Suda, who’s a more accomplished artist.
Pollack was a pillock…
he didn’t create art he created controversies, of course so did quite a few modernists. but one can discern a Dali from a painters sheet…
I challenge you to differentiate a Pollack from one… of course the ‘artistes’ which is what they are, a troupe of actors.. are actually quite unimportant..
it’s the credentialed imbeciles, academics, galleries (yes yes the galleries for all that lovely money laundering) and of course the media that sell it.. or as noted in this screed the CiA.. they furnish the ideology of it all..
Like most snake oil salesmen they exploit the gullibility and more importantly elitist fadism of the self regarding fashionistas.. those that mindlessly follow the herd… to be different..lol..
or as I prefer to term them imbeciles…
By the way it’s not just modern art..
.. a few years back a coterie of swizzlers picked up some naff old painting that had been knocking about for years, sold in the fifties for thirty quid or something…took it to jew yoyk..repainted it in the style of Leonardo da vinci…
proclaimed it an original… a lost treasure the Salvator Mund.. according to the lol experts…
promptly sold it to some arab in a dress for 450.000.000… the most expensive hehe work of art..ever…for laundry.. with some fanfare to up the Ackers and grease a few palms..
It’s now disappeared…
fancy that…
Ah, the thriving spread of demented talmudic communism by making its deranged ‘art & literature’ palatable to the masses via CIA media i.e. ‘see how great the enemies of America have it IN America’ thanks to ‘freedom of expression’ as they pull America down into its snake pit of madness.
I have some drop cloths that I’ve used for various house painting projects over the years and I have quipped to people numerous times that they are not drop cloths, but Jackson Pollock reproductions.
Modern art appreciation is analogous to the “Emperors New Clothes” parable. Most people objectively see it as junk, but claim otherwise to appear more sophisticated, like the emperor’s subjects who celebrated his non-existent clothes.
abstract is no arts . its dirt, trash . JEWISH !
Hitler when was young was a very good postcard
painter despite the jews despise him + composer
Wagner .
At least there was Paul Hogan: in an advert for beer, he is told that a painting is Pollock’s, and he says “I’d agree with that, mate!”
“Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War?” … The utterly untalented Pollock and those other assholes were a weapon alright, but a weapon shoved up the ass of the West by the frothing Jew scum, not a weapon against Russia.
“Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock: they and other artists “captured the world’s attention with large-scale works of pure color and form.” … F*ck right off. “Abstract expressionism” is and was unadulterated sewage. Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock and anyone else pissing against the wall should have been thrown into the street, horse-whipped, force-fed paint and wads of dog shit, and laughed out of town.
So, I lived part-time in Jew York City in 2001-2002 and my smoking hot girlfriend at the time, who had a nice 12th floor place on the east side of Manhattan overlooking the East River, was in the art scene there. There was a reception for an opening at a hip gallery that had a good turnout. The crowd circulated about boozing it up and chowing off their stupidity with their commentary on the “abstract” pieces much in the, umm, mold of that pig-f*cking hack Pollock. Anyway, the “artist” called everyone to attention for a few words then wanted to show a video of his artistic process. Some of the crowd was delighted at the thought of seeing the, umm, genius at work. The lights went down and the projector fired up and….showed the artist giving himself paint enemas then back-door blasting canvas. Hahaha Much of the crowd was aghast, jaws hanging open. Then the artist, to his infinite credit and gaining my respect as well as a huge laugh, started telling it like it was, that abstract expressionism was literally shit and the attendees who had been gushing about the pieces and conjuring up the “meaning” of the pieces were f*cking morons. Brilliant!
I say, Umbra Bellator, that’s a rather distasteful anecdote.
Arse-on-Canvas isn’t a technique I’m familiar with. Was the artist Rolf Harris?
@UB
If your “smoking hot girlfriend” living on Manhattan’s UES in 2001…
had at least 38 DD “twin magnums” then I probably banged her! 🤣
Peter, you have a poor measure of the statistically viable.
I rather suspect that, in 2001, the Upper East Side had its plentiful share of buxom young women. I might have even given a furtive glance in their direction, in those days.
It is neither wholesome nor becoming for one man to mock another, while willingly embracing the hex of the Night Hag.
Better to marry a Mary, than dally with a Lilith.