Sometimes research is a benign form of procrastination. Other times, it’s a tremulous step onto a spider’s web of curiosities and conspiracies until the afternoon’s writing hours are all but devoured.

Such is the case with my current movie project—an art-house extravaganza satirizing the usual suspects: government, religion, corporations, universities and, of course, the media. When a character questions whether the CIA would actually fund research into psychic espionage, another quips, “Well, they funded abstract expressionism, which is far more dangerous.”

This is true. The CIA also funded literary magazines and possibly the Scorpions’ 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change.” And abstract expressionism is far more dangerous (look what it did to Jack the Dripper).

Much of this has been revealed in declassified documents, first-hand testimonies, or the occasional podcast, like journo Patrick Radden Keefe’s paean to the Scorps’ hand in the Cold War, which may itself have been developed by the CIA.

As Josh Jones writes in Open Culture, “The Agency didn’t invent the post-war literary movements that first spread through the pages of magazines like The Partisan Review and The Paris Review in the 1950s. But it funded, organized, and curated them, with the full knowledge of editors like Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, himself a CIA agent.”

Patronage vs. Propaganda

Somehow it’s not surprising the CIA backed these movements. Why wouldn’t they? A) They were cool. B) Their ethoses aligned. C) If you can curate the conditions under which meaning is made, the difference between propaganda and culture is moot.

My question is, where the hell was I when all this government money was being tossed out to artists like fish to Flipper? I’ve been in the indie publishing racket since the advent of what they called “desktop publishing” and haven’t seen a dime from a shadowy government institution (that I know of).

And inasmuch as digital media has “democratized” filmmaking, it’s still a slog to fund movies. My films and my CV have never compelled grantors or intelligence operatives to throw me a bone. But if they did, would I take their dough?

Since the gutting of the National Endowment for the Arts, the CIA seems increasingly like a reliable source for arts funding—like modern Medicis, wielding the soft power of art through their commissions. More like Cosimo de Medici, whose patronage was a form of dominion over the state (and its anagram—taste), and a deliberate means of shaping the culture of Florence’s early Renaissance.

Which makes one wonder—what’s being funded now? Not murals, not little magazines. Probably something that flows invisibly through the algorithm and out of AI prompts…

That said, “As history reveals,” writes Eleanor Heartney in Artnet, “art often finds itself in service to power. But the saga of Cosimo de Medici also suggests there are limits to the control patrons have over the power of art.”

Indeed, between funding and output, intention and interpretation, the work still has a chance to slip its leash. Which is reassuring. Power can commission the work, but it can’t contain it. Something always gets through—a poker tell embedded in an off-note, a secret handshake between the art and its appreciator.

Not that I’d know.
Though I remain, as ever, available.

Sources:

The Awl: Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked

Open Culture: How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Artnet: The Medici Were History’s Greatest Patrons—and Also Tyrants