Thread by @TheBrometheus

Few realize that modern culture is a sham invented in the 1950s and 60s by the CIA to combat Communism with a false rennaissance.

Sounds sketchy? Follow me down the rabbit hole. newyorker.com/magazine/2005/…

When WWII ended, the West was left horrified by the growing threat of communism in Russia. And Americans as former British colonists had always felt looked down upon by Europeans for being backwater hicks without sophistication. Look up the lyrics to Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Russia at the time was spreading propaganda about how fantastic communism could be. Their old culture and architecture had blossomed into a new renaissance from 1880 to 1950. They looked like a cultural powerhouse. America saw this as a problem. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_R…

To combat this, the American CIA needed to manufacture a renaissance in the West. Art needed to come from somewhere. We had a growing movement called Art Deco, but the harsh lines became "too" associated with Stalinist Constructivism in the Soviet Union. moscovery.com/stalinist-empi…

Modern audiences might be most familiar with Art Deco as "That art style used in Batman", especially the animated series from the 1990s. It's also the cover art for a lot of Ayn Rand novels.

The CIA needed to manufacture a renaissance from scratch. They couldn't harness the current art renaissance taking place with Art Deco, because that was too Soviet. And they needed to be the opposite of harsh lines and firm boundaries.

So they created modern art.

Modern art was touted as the greatest freedom of expression. You could just take a picture and turn it various colors, like Andy Warhol. Or splash paint on a canvas and say it expressed a certain emotion. Nothing mattered except feelings. THIS WAS FREEDOM. news.artnet.com/art-world/artc…

Because this new thing had to be uplifted as THE BEST, we started looking at art not as a series of layers but as SCRAPPING EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE. An artist wasn't praised for putting a fresh spin on the masters before him, but for inventing a whole new type of art.

The motto became NEW IS ALWAYS BETTER. Art critics (Many of them also CIA plants or at least on the payroll) lavished praise on those words that were uniquely American. Random, emotive, free. The opposite of Soviet Constructivist.

When the Cold War ended, this manufactured renaissance didn't go away. The general public had been trained to think this way. Critique circles and journalists has been trained to only love NEW and FRESH. Art itself had been changed forever.

We are still dealing with the fallout of this manufactured renaissance. And it's spread globally. You've got giant butt plugs as statues in otherwise picturesque European cities. Did you see this hideous piece of garbage unveiled in the famous Trafalgar Square in London?

As the CIA turned us away from beauty and toward freedom of expression, anyone could create art by pooping on a canvas, sometimes literally. That shifted art from beauty to shock value to get attention.

Modern works like television, video games, and even architecture follow this

The fallout from this manufactured renaissance is a culture without substance. Everything is skin-deep. Art has no layers, just a green splotch on a canvas. We can't even tell what's supposed to be art anymore, like a $120,000 banana duct taped to a wall. independent.co.uk/arts-entertain…

So when you look around and wonder what happened, remember that we live in a post-manufactured renaissance. Our cultural growth was skewed sideways on purpose into a complete non-sequitur to our previous cultural history. That renaissance had no lasting value.

So many young Americans now look outward for culture. To Japan, or to their nation of ethnic origin, or to the ancient past. Modern American culture (and the West in general) lost its identity in a manufactured renaissance that glorified NEW.

New is empty. We are empty.