re: Bill Gates/Microsoft/spirit cooker. When science, technology, and evil merge (vid deleted)

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Microsoft just took down their "commercial" featuring Satanist, Marina Abramovic which had comments turned off, 24k dislikes and now has been fully deleted

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Marina Abramovic Just Wants Conspiracy Theorists to Let Her Be” NYT article 4.21.20

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Ms. Abramovic said the “Spirit Cooking” dinner, which had the same name as a book and a performance in which she painted absurd recipes in blood on the walls of an Italian gallery, actually involved her cooking a few simple dishes for about 20 people who had donated to her art institute. “We had lots of fun,” she said. “There was no human blood, or baby serving, or sex orgies.” So when the conspiracy theories started popping up, Ms. Abramovic said, she thought it was “just insane.” “I am an artist, not a Satanist!” she said.

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Modern art was CIA 'weapon' Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War
By Frances Stonor Saunders Sunday 22 October 1995 00:02

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For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

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To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."

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The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.

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Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows. The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

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