I was waiting for the lights to change to green whilst gazing into a shop window to my left, at a medium sized painting of purple poppies.
My mind had gone off into a reverie about purple poppies dripping opium tears on the road to Samarkand (beyond Enville) and how lapis lazuli is the starry vault of heaven...and how I'd like more lapis lazuli jewellery...
When suddenly I noticed that the lights had changed and I'd better put the car into gear and move!
Ultimately the painting, though pretty, was something any one of us could have done.
No really.
Pretty yes, but is that art?
Accuracy and precision don't necessarily make art.
I have no idea what does...
make something art....
The image had captured my imagination for a short while.
That's all and at the same time, everything...
I guess.
And then, following lines of ideas and myth across the Internet I read that the CIA sponsored and supported 'Rich kids' to be abstract artists because left-leaning liberals are easier to live with than raging communists, and that The Authoritarian Personality Project of the late 1940s wilfully engineered the Baby Boomer drug/rock/sex counterculture two decades later.
The mechanism for this American led cultural push from European Classicism towards:
"perversity, bestialization, and pessimism"And the creation of:
"a cultural wasteland of dumbed-down conformity, and pursuit of sensual gratification,{so} that any isolated case of genius could be easily isolated and destroyed."was called The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).
Apparently the CCF were funded by the CIA and the so the no-art artists got their funding, via the CCF and hence, ultimately from the CIA.
Britain as a satellite state of America, surely not.
So what did happen here?
Common Cause and Industrial Research and Information Services, or so Google tells me...but the links don't make much sense.
Meanwhile, Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler were giving the opening speeches of the CCF in Berlin, June 1950. So CND and paranormal research are I guess, offshoots of the CIA as well.
Seriously though, old Bertrand could be quite Bilderberg in his views, and Koestler had a very bad reputation with women.
The most fascinating member- for me -of the anti communist, anti fascists was Theodor Adorno who recommended a steady cultural diet of "Top Forty" pop music and other forms of "mass culture," which, he argued, over time would trigger various forms of mental breakdown on a mass scale.
The stages of mental breakdown would be:
1/ De-personalisation.
2/ Hebephrenia- "the indifference of the sick individual towards the external".
3/ Catatonia- "a similar behaviour is familiar in patients who have been overwhelmed by shock".
4/ Necrophilia- "Universal necrophilia is the last perversity of style."...
Must admit, all of us ex-listeners to John Peel would agree with those statements, and then go back to our computers.
Meanwhile and finally, there are people who believe that a:
"degenerate Wiemar culture of drugs and perversion...helped usher Hitler into power."So I don't know which way the CIA see it going- if I take it that this whole concept of giving the Lefty liberals sweets and toys to stop them joining the nasty Communists, seriously -I used to see stuff like this all the time on the Internet- people caught up in imaginary games that seemed so real to them.
Do I really think that art and music are degenerate...nope....don't know and don't care.
Poppies, Afghanistan and starry lapis
and the opening lines of Enkidu's dream:
"Listen, my friend, to the dream that I had last night. The heavens cried out and the earth replied, and I was standing between them. There appeared a man of dark visage-- his face resembled the Anzu...."
(tablet 7: Epic of Gilgamesh).
