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Pulsar take: abstract art had no effect on communism one way or the other, the actual op was telling people that the CIA funded it in order to create confusion among the anti-cia crowd about why they would do that.
I refuse to believe that the concept of "show dont tell" is a CIA op designed to discourage leftist thought. Fucking hell, it encourages critical thinking by making you figures out what's happening, it fosters creativity for both the reader and the writer.
Laying thick with no file is the fucking hallmark of reactionary literature, like Atlas Shrugged's ideology is only the secondary reason why it was ass. The primary reason is the pages long word vomit that only becomes worse by its ideology. A leftist word vomit is going to be tolerable because at least I agree with them.
If every leftist fiction literature is going to have a segment where a side character recited the entirety of Marx's body writing for the 10th time in one chapter alone, I'm going to commit liberalism and reads hentai.
I refuse to believe that the concept of “show dont tell” is a CIA op designed to discourage leftist thought
It was ostensibly coined by Anton Chekov although he seems to have meant it in terms of set dressing or plot points like you don't make awkward dialogue about the surroundings if you can make the set show those details to the audience directly (IIRC he gave an example about a full moon, like you wouldn't have the actors show up and go "WOW THAT MOON SURE IS SOMETHING HUH? SURE IS FULL AIN'T IT? BEAUTIFUL NIGHT IT IS WITH THAT FULL MOON UP THERE!" to paraphrase, you'd instead try to imply the presence of a bright moon through light reflecting on glass in a window or something).
Extending that to meanings and ideology, however, was 100% a CIA thing: those guidelines came from CIA associated academics and went alongside a lot of other formal and informal censorship of leftist politics in media. It can't be looked at in isolation: it was just one piece of a larger concerted effort to purge the left from every platform that could be used to propagandize and to ensure that new artists and writers were taught from the outset to not make blunt political statements and to instead simply portray a world that was in line with capitalist thought. It's the sort of thing that created capitalist realism as such a culturally hegemonic phenomenon, where nearly all art under capitalism simply reflects capitalism as the natural state of being with no direct commentary or contradiction (hence how pervasive the liberal "showing things that are bad, and acknowledging that they are materially bad, but not extending to an ideological critique or offering any alternatives other than 'wot if capitalism but good ceo?'" trope is).
I'm not familiar with the usage of "show don't tell" against directly politically ranting (although hell, if it was written well enough -- Grapes of Wrath was so overtly political it was banned for being communist) -- the way I've seen it used is more in the vein of Chuck Palahnuik's article:
From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.
Instead of characters knowing anything, you must now present the details that allow the reader to know them. Instead of a character wanting something, you must now describe the thing so that the reader wants it.
Instead of saying: “Adam knew Gwen liked him.”
You’ll have to say: “Between classes, Gwen was always leaned on his locker when he’d go to open it. She’d roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume. The combination lock would still be warm from her ass. And the next break, Gwen would be leaned there, again.”
Chucky helpfully makes my point for me by giving an example of precisely why it's bad advice and leads to less subtle writing, shallower characterization, inability to make a quick point without needing to set up an entire scene, etc.
But to be fair, I don't think the modern incarnation and those who advise it are influenced by the CIA (as much as the rule may/may not have roots there). It seems to me that since the massive rise of visual media, some people see literature as this sort of sub-art to film & television. It's implicitly lesser to them because they do not see the benefits literature has over every other medium; it does the most liftinwith 'mere' words, not images/audio, the co-imbuement into characters & description is on a level beyond even videogames, poeticism and character depth because it can tell.
Coincidentally, Chuck's novels do not display any of this.
Amateur writing communities & art critics use easy rules to shortcut their own lack of knowledge, and so the rule spreads. They devalue their own craft through this view of it as sub-art, and that literature should only be moving pictures, able to be quickly adapted to a screen in a Netflix movie or Amazon series. After all, what other goal could it have?
I doubt the CIA actively created any kind of art as a propaganda vehicle. People who become deep state drones are the most boring, philistine normies you can think of or absolute psychos who don't have any care for art of any kind (besides cargo cult worship of shit like classical music that teacher told them was "good"). Same reason why none of your favorite podcasts are CIA ops - you can't do drugs and join the CIA (only sell them). They're fucking bores, they couldn't come up with convincing art.
The bigger goal is to bribe people like abstract artists and make sure that they don't become a threat.
The reasoning for elevating Pollock was to prevent art from making a statement. Pollock's art refused to mean anything. It was peak individualism, as you weren't viewing his art and seeing something everyone else also saw, experiencing a collective idea, you were seeing his art and drawing inferences from within your own mind.
I'm not sure the CIA like engineered Pollock in a lab or anything, I think some spook weirdo just liked his work because of the individualism aspect (probably couldn't even explain that was why). Something gets pushed around about creating/funding an alternative to socialist realism and Pollock gets some CIA cash.
No, this take doesn't make a lot of sense. It wasn't even known they did that until much later. It was part of a culture war component of the Cold War. It wasn't about having an effect on communism, it was about owning the USSR by saying "look at the INNOVATION that our country breeds, socialist realism is outdated".
It may not have affected communism, but it affected me by making me get slightly mad, and that's even worse.
Owning the libs by going to their house at 3am and blasting proletkult operas like victory over the sun on repeat and when they complain declaring it modern art
Socialist Realism kinda sucks ass, people aren't just dumb sheep that dont understand or value art unless it's the most two dimensional portrayal of working class shit ever. It keeps being praised in leftist spaces and just, you dont have to love something just cause it was done in a socialist country, same shit with people who only listen to big orchestral leftist anthems or "guy with an acoustic guitar that sings about class struggle". Yes these people exist I have known too many.
Socialist Realism kinda sucks ass, people aren’t just dumb sheep that dont understand or value art unless it’s the most two dimensional portrayal of working class shit
Geez I just like painting of swole dudes driving tractors and shit, give me a break man
Thats fine but officializing it as like "proletarian art" is at best patronizing and at worst ends up paralleling nationalist propaganda and art, the art in itself isnt "bad" or whatever but the thought behind it definitely has a lot of bad ideas to it.
Constructivism was bad ass and it sucks that it was ignored in favor of socialist realism.
There was a huge amount of artistic creativity flowing out of the Soviet bloc anyways, even with the state sanctioned realism. Which didn't even last that long, just look at the posters here. Socialist Realism was the Greco-Roman domes and columns of the Soviet bloc. Just an artistic choice for state stuff and not something that was necessarily pervasive outside that.
I'm getting Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge for my wall alongside a Van Gogh but even being a modernism nerd Soviet art by and large is just kind of eh to me. It did some interesting things in terms of intentionally flipping class dynamics in art, but that wasn't a novel idea and the works themselves usually aren't interesting. Compared to some of the other 1930s-40s movements, it's nothing I would uphold as the future of modernism.
I think there's still some interesting things, especially Proletkult and some of the 60s era space stuff.
Prolekult was from the same era as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. That's where I really like Soviet art, when it was a political revolution on top of modernism's perspective revolution. The hell of the 40s seemed to mostly stop that. I think nonconformist art is neat in the same way that Marcel Duchamp is one of my favourite artists, but it's such an internal dialogue between the artist and the Soviet state that it doesn't have the same sense of universal relevancy that other movements do. I can still be a dadist and consider Hexbear to be dada in forum form even if none of us lived through World War 1. Maybe it's just ignorance but I can't similarly put myself in the shoes of a 1950s-70s Soviet artist responding to a state that's completely foreign to me and a project I lost faith in with Khrushchev.
The nonconformists are pretty good (and I think that Picasso or Stravinsky's work is as much of an internal dialogue with the west as the non-conformists' is), but I was also thinking of the populist neo-futurist art of the 50s-60s. Khrushchev may well have doomed the union, but the art of the Soviet high water mark has such a sense of optimism and merges the modernist and Soviet Realist trends quite effectively, I think.
Ah yes the carefree days when I was a rosy cheeked 13 year old and the pandemic was still a year away
My favorite part was looking at the profile and seeing like 30 anarchist memes.
I want to look more into it, because the cia money could just go straight to art critics to talk about more selfish, libertarian artists, and it would probably be easier to pull off the whole thing.
It probably had happened like that, but I’m too tired and lazy to read it.
IIRC it wasn't entirely about removing politics from art, it was also a geopolitical dick-waving thing to encourage a "high-art" scene that was uniquely western and entirely at odds with modernist art like socialist realism. It accomplished two goals for them then: emphasizing and helping meaningless nonsense to dominate the western art scene and academia, and cultivating the cultural prestige that art scene carried with it.
It was a “Keeping-up-with-the-Jones” except it was with science and culture, which we threw out the moment the USSR crumbled
