rivera vs rockefeller -- art's other history

Throughout the ages people in power quickly learn the minds of the masses can be manipulated with art, and they attempt to limit what people see in order to control what they think. In the twentieth century the free press made this sort of censorship impossible, so those wielding great wealth hatched an extravagant scheme to steal art’s ability to speak the truth by canceling its ability to say anything at all. They called their poison apple ‘modern art.’

A lie within a lie would be pretty hard to crack but since we all have eyes maybe we can find the truth anyway. The first lie goes like this......   After the second great war the world was divided into two opposing camps, one that believed in collective will and the other that was based on individual self-interest. They named this period of bilateral confrontation the ‘cold war’ and it unleashed unrestrained competition on all fronts. America’s best minds from its best families decided they’d do their part by managing the cultural conflict, the battle for hearts and minds. They asserted american preeminence by demolishing the elitist reserves of old europe with the brute force of lots of money.

The truth is they were never really concerned about the russians, walled in behind an ‘iron curtain’ that we ourselves created and made to seem more powerful than they were on the evening news. There was, however, one person on earth the ultra-wealthy actually feared and that was the politically progressive artist, Diego Rivera. In mexico he and his compatriots had proven the power of visual art to bring about social change. The mexican muralists had raised and united the consciousness of a regionally diverse nation, previously convulsed in factional revolution. These painters were committed to social justice and economic reform and to the alarm of bankers in NY their movement was spreading into the US, largely through WPA commissioned murals in post offices and public buildings.

In the years before the war the financial barons conceived an elaborate plot to humiliate and vanquish international progressive thought as expressed through visual art. Nelson Rockefeller and his clan lured the prominently progressive Rivera with a chance to paint a mural in the lobby of the newly constructed Rockefeller Center, a building made of steel that might last a thousand years. He accepted their bait and after several months working day and night, at the moment he accepted their check they jack-hammered it down without allowing any photographs to be taken. In all the history of art and in the course of civilization this was one barbaric gangster statement. (this mural was later recreated in Mexico city). They then began a massive clandestine campaign to eliminate the voice of visual art altogether.

The cold war became their cover story for thrusting abstract expressionism upon the world. It was used like a cultural battering ram to bully and upstage the other side’s classical ballet, their music and literature. To drive home the notion of american ideals they sponsored an art so profoundly individualistic that only the artist knew what it meant, and they pushed hard with tons of public cash for all art thereafter to be ‘non-objective.’ A gigantic government agency was formed to enforce a virtual ban on representational art at all levels, the outwardly beneficent NEA with its myriad affiliations. They assured everyone they were being progressive by only supporting an art that no member of the general public could possibly relate to, as this was in fact their guiding principle. The origins and the means of this massive cultural manipulation and distortion have been documented with names, dates, and deeds, and their sins are confessed by their successors in nostalgic terms as perhaps over-zealous patriotism, but that’s just another lie.

The truth is it’s time for artists to spend more time in the studio and less time as cooks and servers, sweeping floors or delivering stuff, all such as that. This will require recently stressed and newly awakened citizens to begin buying original art to hang in their homes. Actually looking at all the art available, hanging in salons and restaurants, in offices and reception areas, tends to negate just about everything taught in school, and occasionally it arouses thoughts and feelings the very wealthy would like to keep to themselves, or at least eliminate for everyone else. At this moment and after long exile, Diego Rivera returns with a major show at the Whitney in NY, and the potency of articulate and universal visual images will go rippling out in all directions, invading art schools, and then galleries, and finally going up on the wall in peoples’ houses.