Shifting the Veil
Monday, July 21, 2008
It's always heartening to see art being used as a last-ditch attempt to patch up holes in the public image of powerful destructive nations. A really good example was the CIA funding of Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War (and that includes you, Mr Twombly), helping to construct an image of America as a global superpower of Freedom and Culture, not just nuclear arsenals.
In recent years it's been interesting to see France's tense post-colonial relationship with the Muslim world, a vast proportion of which seems to have taken up residence in Paris, at least in the opinion of a lot of French people. It appears the French are right up there with the worst of dastardly white South Africans with their entrenched racism and snobbery towards all but their own blood. The fear of being overrun by foreigners on their home turf (after overrunning everyone else's) has resulted in a distinct turn to the right in French politics, accompanied by a resurgence of their gun-running activities in Africa, a trade in which they have been the world's worst offenders, above even Britain and the US, in the past couple of years, as Jacob Zuma can no doubt confirm. Angry outbursts in Paris resulted in the French government taking the very subtle decision to ban the wearing of Muslim head scarves.
Which makes the planned new wing of the Louvre a particularly delectable piece of irony. The scarves which may no longer be worn on heads are the inspiration for this architectural marvel aimed at giving Arabic people a sense of inclusion in French culture. Ah, art. What a crucial role it plays, doesn't it?
posted by Vince Condesini at 7:41 PM
12 Comments:
The scarf is a bit more like a white flag of surrender: "I know the oil wars are coming, and I don't want to get shot!"
Aren't we all, at heart, just Islamic headscarves blowing in the wind (or, at least, Islamic headscarf-shaped glass ceilings pretending to be blowing in the wind)?
Are you looking for an answer my friend?
Some of us just have a lot of wind blowing around in our heads.
I think it's great. I mean, like, I can't wear my headscarf at school and stuff, but like the museum takes that into account and gives me like a virtual headscarf to wear when I'm there. Which makes me feel all warm inside, almost like I'm a REAL french person. Who knows, maybe next they'll stop spitting on me as I walk past. Ooh, I'm going all warm again.
But nobody would dream of getting a Muslim architect to do the job, this has to be Europe's respresentation of Islam to Europe and any Muslim person should be honoured to be acknowledged indirectly and know that their place is not as the representer but as the represented.
french: cunts
artheat uct people: ummm
are you saying jackson pollock was funded by the CIA? My undersanding is that abstract FORMALISM was supported (Louis, Noland, Judd et. al) but i struggle to reconcile rothko; and pollock's drunken bohemian existential lurching at transcendence a la navajo indigenians with reactionary paranoid conspiracy theories aimed at the CIA...
maybe its just me
Abstract expressionism and the Cold War
Since mid 1970s it has been argued by revisionist historians that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA, who saw it as a representative of the USA as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets. The book by Frances Stonor Saunders [1], The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, [2] and other publications such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, detail how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950–67. Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War, argue that much of this information (as well as the revisionists' interpretation of it) concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s is flatly false, or at best (contrary to the revisionists' avowed historiographic principles) decontextualized[citation needed]. Other books on the subject include Art in the Cold War by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet Union at the same time; and Pollock and After edited by Francis Frascina, which reprinted the Kimmelman article[citation needed].
So they most likely didn't know where the money was really coming from at the time. But then if you look at how local artists found themselves suddenly able to find very flattering things to say and believe about Brett Kebble, artists are no different to anyone else in the field of willful delusion.
same same but different:
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/finch7-23-08.asp
I pasted that in my url window thingy and it didn't work. Missing a digit maybe?
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