17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

Wisner then goes on in his letter to Rockefeller to make several suggestions for future cultural exchange with the Soviet Union. Regarding music, “our initial presentations to Soviet audiences should aim for mass appeal” and be “expressive of our folklore or unmistakably typical of the U.S.” Musical shows such as Oklahoma, Carousel, or Kiss Me Kate would suit this purpose; even the Ice Capades might serve “as a good example of American showmanship in pageantry, skill, and precision.” Another possibility, and a “pet theory of my own,” Wisner professed, was to send “one of our top-flight ‘name’ jazz orchestras.” It might be advisable to prepare the cultural ground in the Soviet Union by first exposing “their audiences to American symphonic organizations,” such as, for example, the BSO.

“A subsequent introduction of first-rate American jazz against this back-

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drop would serve to demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American musicianship in rather telling terms.” Finally, having reasserted the desir-ability of using such productions to showcase the talents of “negro performers” in order to demonstrate simultaneously their “capacity” and “the opportunities they have in U.S. artistic life,” Wisner closed by pronouncing on the place of the visual arts in possible Soviet-American exchanges.

“In the realm of painting and sculpture, almost anything of quality that the U.S. could exhibit is likely to surpass conventionalized Soviet efforts,”

he confidently told Rockefeller. “However, in initial displays, extreme modern or experimental forms should be avoided.”46

Wisner’s letter is concerned specifically with U.S. cultural diplomacy in the Soviet Union, so it should not necessarily be read as a definitive statement of CIA aesthetics in the cultural Cold War generally. There is still much good evidence to support the revisionist argument that there was a basic sympathy between many intelligence officers and modernist artists, based on such shared values as formalism, internationalism (or “cosmopol-itanism”), and elitism.47 That said, Wisner’s letter, combined with other proof that “extreme modern or experimental forms” were not always privileged over the middlebrow or popular, cautions us that pragmatism was an equally, if not more, decisive factor in shaping the CIA’s cultural patronage. What mattered ultimately was a cultural activity’s effectiveness in helping the U.S. cause in the Cold War. If an artist’s work was considered unlikely to impress foreign opinion positively, it would be ignored.

One project, for example, an international sculpture competition to design a monument to political prisoners staged by the London Institute of Contemporary Arts and funded by the CIA via John Hay Whitney, was abandoned halfway through in the face of unfavorable British press attention.48

There were also two prosaic, but nonetheless important, considerations. First, because the CIA patronized only those cultural practices that needed financial subsidy, its patronage is bound in retrospect to appear highbrow. The Agency clearly was also interested in such mass media as the Hollywood movie industry (as is discussed below), but its influence over them was restricted by their economic self-sufficiency. Second, it is possible that some intelligence officers, out of a desire to enhance their personal image and divert attention from some of their less benign covert activities in the Cold War, have since portrayed the CIA as a more en-

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lightened cultural patron than it in fact was. In Agency legend, the cultural Cold War has come to perform something of a redemptive function.

If revisionism’s account of the CIA’s aesthetic preferences needs some modification, so too does its portrayal of the Agency’s cultural influence.

The implied claim in the British title of Saunders’s book, Who Paid the Piper? —that America’s Cold War spy establishment called the tune of western intellectual life—is problematic in several respects. To begin with, the CIA could not always predict or control the actions of the musicians, writers, and artists it secretly patronized. The history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s involvement with America’s avant-garde is littered with incidents of literary feuding, prima donna-ish tantrums, and various other forms of temperamental behavior, several of which are related by Saunders herself. A South American tour by Robert Lowell had to be curtailed when the poet threw away the pills prescribed for his manic depression, stripped naked, and mounted an equestrian statue in one of the main squares of Buenos Aires, declaring himself to be “Caesar of Ar-gentina” and his CCF minder one of his generals. Ad Reinhardt denounced his fellow abstract expressionists for “selling out,” calling Rothko a “Vogue magazine cold-water-flat-fauve,” Pollock a “Harpers Bazaar bum,”