I’m interested in the expressionism posts. Please post.
I’m pondering Man Ray and George Hodel and the spooks.
Growing up, I loved comic art, Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, Edward Hopper, greek and roman sculpture, Michelangelo. Get to University of Texas in early 70s, and everyone's doing abstract expressionism. I'm told all the art I love is junk, and the real geniuses are guys like Jackson Pollock (died in drunken car wreck,) Mark Rothko (suicide,) and the NY "School of 7." I learned the language, got a degree with honors, but also figured out the art faculty at the school were government employees who sat around drinking coffee all day and talking about how tough it was to be an artist. I used to drive them crazy because I could spout all the theory, but also told them "this stuff sucks."
Read "The Painted Word" by Tom Wolfe, which started peeling back the layers. Wolfe described how movies, plays and music rose or sank based on tickets or records sold, but art was considered successful based on the opinions of three Jewish art critics from the New York Times.
Later, I found out the CIA funded abstract expressionism. The reason they gave was that it was a cultural tool used to show the US was open-minded, as opposed to the patriotic stuff in the Soviet Union. The CIA is a secret wrapped in a lie wrapped in a misdirection, though. They admitted they funded it, but why should I believe their reason? I've come to believe the real reason was to break down our society's ability to think in classical terms, and also to develop a culture that wasn't worth defending.
They took the worst crap they could find, Nelson Rockefeller (Museum of Modern Art) started buying these painting for MILLIONS. Why? Who was he bidding against? NO ONE. The insane prices were to make the paintings important. I'd say Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles painting was awful, the teacher would say, "He got four million for that painting." People didn't like the art, but they understood millions of dollars.
More later if anyone is interested.