THE COMMIES USED to deride Western modern art as decadent and elitist, a tool of imperial idologists.

Turns out they were right, at least partly, about the latter accusation.

Frances Stonor Saunders’s new book The Cultural Cold War relates the now-it-can-be-revealed tale of how the Central Intelligence Agency organized and funded a series of foundations that funnelled cash into museums, galleries, publications, and arts promoters.

The CIA’s purpose: to promote a vision of American arts and letters as a font of modern progressiveness, boldly looking forward into a future of vigor and abstract sophistication.

The intended audience: Not really Americans, but ’50s-early ’60s European intellectuals tempted by the egalitarian promises of Soviet Communism (and by the more practicable, less cruelty-laden realities of the milder Euro-socialism).

If Saunders is to be believed, not just the success of certain artistic styles but the careers of specific individuals, most notably Jackson Pollack, could be credited to the spy agency’s indirect and uncredited support.

It wanted to brand America as a land of free thinkers and big ideas, of clean lines and industrious energy–as contrasted to those clumsily censorous Soviets with their oh-so-passe heroic realism and their brutalist architecture.

Other U.S. agencies were doing similar jobs at the time, more overtly. The U.S. Information Agency, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe regularly promoted the U.S. in western and eastern Europe in just these ways. The aspects that made the CIA program different were its scope, its covertness, and its role as an cultural patron (not just as a publicist).

From the present-day viewpoint, it’s ironic-‘N’-odd to imagine the federal government (particularly one of its most reactionary, militaristic segments) as a friend and proponent of rebellious creative folk. Thirty-two years or so of anti-government and anti-authority attitudes in much of the arts world, plus twenty or so years of anti-modernist and kill-the-NEA attitudes among prominent politicians (some of whom seem to prefer a Soviet-realist style aesthetic!), have put many in the boho-world onto a permanent distrust of federal largesse.

Besides, the real money these days, for any and every nonmilitary endeavor, really comes from big business.

Warhol, you may remember, was a mostly un-ironic champion of logos, brand names, and guys with money. More recently, that oh-so-controversial shock-art show in Brooklyn, N.Y. may have been housed at a partly government-supported space, but it was organized and funded by a British ad agency.

While much has been made lately of the problems some arts funders are having in raising money from the dot-com nouveau riche, overall it’s still business that’s increasingly the main patron of bigtime contemporary arts iin the U.S.

Why’s business doing this? The same reason the CIA used to: Branding.

Global marketers have long relied on images of America as the land of the open road, rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, and self-styled “rebels.”

By funding and promoting brash, loud art, corporations are further promoting this image of America–or at least of the America corporations would currently like to help create.

Again, artists are being utilized as part of an ideological crusade.

But these days, the mythical warrior figure is the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Cultural Rebel–first cousin to the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Corporate Rebel.

MONDAY: American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.

ELSEWHERE:

• Direct from the IBM department of baffling conundrums, a monthly math story problem to ponder….