Art and the Cold War

Louis Menand has an interesting review of the role American artists played in the propoganda war -- both overt and covert -- that hummed along as background music during the Cold War. It is also a great reminder that the Wingnutocracy isn't a recent phenomenon.

“Advancing American Art” was a boomerang, reconfirming the very prejudices about American philistinism that it was intended to demolish. It also helped to put a man named George Dondero into the history books. Dondero was a congressman from Michigan, and his tender appreciations of modern art are so often quoted that one almost suspects that he composed them with solely that aim in mind. It is hard to believe, for example, that his great 1949 speeches against “the black knights of the isms” were the work of a man incapable of irony:

The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.

Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.
Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth. . . .
Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.
Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. . . .
Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.
Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.