re: You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at its art

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Under normal conditions the CIA is supposed to be responsible for obtaining information from internal and external threats and deliver them to the U.S. President and his cabinet. Apparently Truman’s administration felt either embarrassed enough, or considered this matter enough of a national security risk, to involve the agency. Now the goals were to promote modern and abstract art, in order to make America seem more sophisticated and cosmopolitan and to make the Soviets look out of touch. Former CIA man Tom Braden described the process. “We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, ‘We want to set up a foundation.’ We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, ‘Of course I’ll do it,’ and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device.” This is how, for example, the now-defunct Farfield Foundation came to be.

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