“Sounds like the kind of thing the conspiracy theorists would jump all over. But
I can’t believe something so big could go unnoticed for all this time?” [Said Andy.]

    “Look up ‘The Comptroller of the Currency.’ There’s a spreadsheet you can
download there listing all the Fed’s shareholder banks. You can check them for
yourself. The reason it seems too incredible is you never hear a whisper of this
anywhere – not in school, or in the media, or in popular culture – certain things
are simply never discussed.
    “And who would ever believe the most influential arts organization in the west
was a project of the U.S. Military Government? The Psychological Warfare
Division, no less. Or that the Abstract Expressionist movement, and much of the film
and theatre of the fifties, was orchestrated and sponsored by the CIA? You couldn’t
make up something that sounded more like a conspiracy theory, but you can check
this as well: The Origins of The Congress for Cultural Freedom. There’s been an essay on the CIA website since 2007, but I’ve still only met two people in the art world
who’d even heard of the CCF, let alone knew its history.”

    “Why would the CIA admit to this? Kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?”

    “It’s good PR, I suppose, but you’re right. Some of the people involved saw
themselves as having fought the good fight against communism, and they’re
justifiably proud of their success. Capitalism triumphed in the end. The CCF
sprung out of a meeting of intellectuals at the Titania Hotel right after the Berlin
Airlift. The Americans were still running the city but the Soviets controlled all of
East Germany and most of Eastern Europe. Containing communism was definitely
a high priority, but this wasn’t the only objective. Doesn’t it strike you as strange
that you’ve never heard anything about this before – if it was such a good cause?”

    “And it’s all out in the open now?”

    “The Europeans knew what was going on at the time, and they saw it as
American imperialism. ‘Dulles’ twelve apostles.’ That’s what the abstract
expressionists were called when they exhibited in Paris. Dulles was the CIA director
then. So the CIA has come clean, for the art establishment though, it’s a bit of a
problem. The story we’ve been told, for the past sixty years, is that all those postwar
art movements emerged spontaneously and evolved naturally by virtue of their
own merits. AbEx was portrayed as the furthest thing possible from propaganda
art, and now this. It’s gotta be a little embarrassing.” 

    “Now that’s a great story. You should write another book.”

    “There are some good ones already, but maybe I should. They all seem to miss
the big story, speaking as an artist that is, which is the fact that art would be the
instrument of choice for such an ambitious project. The Bilderberg Foundation
calls the CCF ‘one of the CIA’s boldest covert operations.’ Art is a lot more powerful
than people think. It isn’t just something you ‘pick up’ at the local box store,
innocuous decor to fill an empty space on the wall, or to accent the couch. Art is
an ideological statement and you would not believe how dark this story gets, Andy.”

    “On second thought,” Andy reflected, “if you’re still hoping to sell work to those
big city art galleries, you probably shouldn’t be saying things that put them on the
spot... and if you ever want to work for the mint again, you might want to stay away
from all that financial stuff as well.”

    “Well, the mint is actually encouraging people to buy gold and silver, so I’m
arguing their case really. The mint and the Central Bank are two completely
separate entities, as I was reminded when I asked about the Norwegian maple leaf
that now adorns the new, plastic Canadian twenty dollar bill. Forget about
conspiracy theories though. How many times have regulators and financial experts
almost let the system come apart?

    “If they can’t afford to bail everyone out the next time around, or if they reduce
the middle class to poverty as a result of their outstanding work, no one will be
buying art, or much of anything else for that matter. All those bailouts, just like
inflation, represent a huge invisible tax, a transfer of wealth from taxpayers, to
the people who habitually mismanaged the financial world. Unless, of course, this
is how the system was designed to work? How else can you explain the fact that
the ‘experts’ bollocks things up, so badly, over and over again?”

    “I thought you weren’t talking about conspiracies anymore?”

    “I’m just looking at the facts. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, on both
sides of the argument, but look at what’s happened over the last hundred years, it’s
always the most outrageous of claims that appear to be closest to the reality of
things... ”

    “[T]hose Romantic painters back in the eighteenth-century, they didn’t ignore this stuff either. John Ruskin and the Hudson River School artists, they railed against the ‘copper-hearted barbarians,’ and they spoke out against social injustice wherever they saw it. On Art and Life, one of Ruskin’s more well-known books, says it all really. Forget about Art for art’s sake. Art and life are inseparable.”

    “Copper-hearted barbarians? Is that what they called the bankers?” [Asked Andy]

    “Industrialists, in this case, destroying the New Eden. They weren’t bemoaning
development, not in principle anyway, or science and technology, or even rich people. Most of the artists were pretty well off themselves. It was the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution they objected to and the destruction of values. They saw America as a chance to start fresh and do things right. If you were to read Ruskin’s book, published in 1886, you’d think he was talking about the world today. (Excerpt 2) And The Romantic Manifesto – that’s Ayn Rand’s vision for a better society. People think all she wrote about was money and intrusive, over-taxing governments.”

    “She does, doesn’t she?”

    “She writes just as much about art and creativity. The Romantic Manifesto, of
course, it’s all about art, and The Fountainhead as well.”

    “There was a film made of that, I think.”

    “There was, with Gary Cooper, but her most famous book is Atlas Shrugged [...]”