I came across an interesting article which gave evidence for the proposition that Modern Art is a CIA “psyop”. The short-short version is that, during the cold war, the CIA funded modern art to show off how free the west is because communist countries wouldn’t let artists make anything that ugly. I am not really in a position to evaluate the evidence cited by the article, but this is a very interesting explanation because it’s more plausible than anything else I’ve heard.

The basic thing that needs to be explained is how such bad art ever came to be popular. There are various partial explanations, most having to do with the trauma of the two world wars and the influence of recreational drugs interacting with rich snobs who wanted to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses who recently gained access to art through technology which made reasonably faithful reproductions inexpensive. These explanations never really satisfied me, though. It just didn’t feel like enough of a motivation.

The CIA promoting this art feels more plausible. It gives the right kind of perverse motivation—an outright competitive motivation completely decoupled with having to live with the consequences of one’s decision. If a real art collector pays a million dollars for a bad painting he’s going to have to keep looking at the awful thing. If a CIA operative pays a million dollars for a painting, he never has to look at it again. Plus, it’s not his money.

The basic approach will work, too. If you have tens of millions of dollars per year to burn plus patience and some basic understanding of human nature, you can make a style of art prestigious. You can’t make it popular, but that’s not at all the same thing. To be prestigious means to convey status to that small subgroup who is obsessed with status and will do anything to get it. You can make galleries, you can put on gatherings with good food and nice amenities, you can pay select artists.

It’s also plausible because it doesn’t take that much money to get a largish number of people to do something as long as you’re careful to make everyone in the large group think that they have a chance of being one of the lucky few. Reality TV shows demonstrated that the right kind of person will do a huge amount of work for the chance at not all that much money.

And such things inevitable take on a life of their own. Once people think that there’s money in something, some people will add their own money in the hope of making more. Speculation can drive prices up, for example. Some people who want to purchase status will jump on the bandwagon.

And then there’s the interesting question of how much of the current art market is just money laundering. Bad art is very easy to produce. If I want to pay you money for something illegal in a way that looks legitimate (since governments pay attention to large transfers of money), buying the illegal thing plus a bad painting and claiming that all of the money was for the bad painting works well for laundering. I even came up with this idea on my own for a story about an assassin, where to launder the payments he would see a modern art painting to the people paying for the hit. (This also enabled him to report the money to the IRS.) How much of the current market for modern art this is I am in no position to say, but I’ll happily believe north of 99% of it.