The CIA behind the contemporary art farce

In 1947, communism was spreading dangerously through Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, while in the United States a hysterical witch hunt was beginning where no one was safe from being accused of being a communist and imprisoned.

One of the roles of the CIA, founded that same year and still lacking its extensive history of human rights violations, extortion, torture, and the financing and arming of dictators, mafias, and drug cartels, was to replicate socialist realism with its soldiers, proletarians, and peasants chanting "Let's go to work!" under the watchful eye of the mustachioed comrade of the moment. To this end, the CIA set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a front founded in West Berlin with CIA funds and run by a CIA agent. This organization brought together a motley menagerie of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists, all united to make abstract expressionism the symbol of freedom.

Mark Rothko – No. 5/No.22 (1950, MoMA)

The artists—marginalized immigrants with a strong propensity for alcoholism—were named De Kooning, Pollock, or Rothko, and they had the ideal profile of anti-heroes—especially Rothko, born in the Russian Empire—to sell the idea and saddle them with such a laudable task. The CCF itself, active in thirty-five countries, handled the promotion, hosting in its more than twenty magazines a host of critics who, from then on, granted themselves the right to declare to the world that those works created in a matter of hours were the quintessence of art.

Since the project needed an international focus, the CCF sought generous contributions from millionaires and museums. The most prominent, to stay within the realm of criminal activity, was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In fact, Rockefeller was one of the biggest patrons of Abstract Expressionism, which he called "free enterprise painting."

Willem De Kooning - Ganesvoort Steet (1949, The Willem de Kooning Foundation)

Thanks to all of this, by 1956, 33 international exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism had already been organized. And in 1958, a major two-year tour was launched, promoted, surprise surprise, by MoMA. Cities like Basel, Brussels, West Berlin, Milan, and Paris hosted the exhibition, but when the Tate Gallery in London claimed it couldn't afford it, an altruistic millionaire named Julius Fleischmann stepped in. Fleischmann was president of the Farfield Foundation, funded by the CIA, so the American taxpayer ended up footing the bill for the exhibition.

While none of this is new, nor is the "art" promoted by politicians and bureaucrats without artistic judgment, what is pathetic is that what once might have sounded exotic or exciting — like the vestiges of communist art relegated to museums — laid the foundations and the workings of the most lucrative scam of our times , as we wrote in our previous article.

And that which should have died out decades ago is still as relevant as it was seventy-five years ago, dragging a stench of rancid, already rotten — to borrow the expression of José Luís Infiesta, founder of the MEAM — that will continue to stink as long as those who promote it have the economic capacity to keep their sacred monsters in mausoleums, like some communist comrades, and their talentless layabouts artificially propelled from nothing into the pages of international criticism.