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Sara Krahenbuhl's avatar

I love this and think about these ideas all the time. When you mentioned that the UN has wood walls and carpeted floors, I thought of how much modern society values comfort. Wood and carpet are warm and soft and they muffle sound. Stone buildings are cold and hard and they echo. Placing comfort as a high priority means things won’t last, and I also wonder how good it can actually be for us to frequently be in a state of comfort. If that’s one of our highest aims, no wonder there are no great artists - no one is willing to exert himself beyond his comfort zone.

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Caroline Hahn's avatar

Thank you for this, this is a great article!! I’m an art historian, and I thought you might find this related information interesting - I can assure you it’s completely factual; I’m actually giving a lecture on it this Friday. I firmly believe another reason contemporary art is so divorced from the historical art canon is due to the fact that during the 1950’s, the CIA (working in conjunction with the MoMA - the Chairman of the Board and the Executive Secretary were both CIA agents) actively bought, promoted and toured Abstract Expressionism throughout the world during the Cold War to combat soviet socialist realism. They operated through a front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom which had offices in 35 countries, hosted art exhibitions and awards, and actively operated 20+ prestige magazines writing about and hailing American Abstract Expressionsim as the culmination of modernist achievement. John Hay Whitney (President and Chairman of the Board at the MoMA, agent of the CIA and head of the Whitney foundation) actively used his foundation’s money to award grants to art schools that taught new AbEx methods of painting. This fundamentally and completely transformed art education - independent art schools became decreasingly popular, representational painters and teachers were discouraged (and in some cases even fired), and the time tested methods of the masters were removed from art curricula in favor of these new, “highly acclaimed” modern methods.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I can assure you it’s all true - much of my research was done using primary sources found through the freedom of information act reading room on the CIA’s website. I’m really passionate about letting people know about this because it is NOT taught in art history curricula. I hope you find it as insightful as I have!

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