How Did Art and Literature Change During the Cold War

'The Gratis World: Fine art and Thought in the Cold State of war,' by Louis Menand: An Extract

April 23, 2021

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PREFACE

This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the residue of the world. In the twenty years after the finish of the 2nd Earth State of war, the Usa invested in the economic recovery of Japan and Western Europe and extended loans to other countries around the world. With the United Kingdom, it created the World Depository financial institution and the International Budgetary Fund to support global political stability and international trade. It hosted the new United Nations. Through its government, its philanthropic foundations, its universities, and its cultural institutions, it established substitution programs for writers and scholars, distributed literature around the globe, and sent art from American collections and music by American composers and performers abroad. Its entertainment culture was enjoyed virtually everywhere. And it welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries. Works of literature and philosophy from all over the world were published in affordable translations. Foreign movies were imported and distributed across the land.

The number of Americans attending higher increased exponentially. Volume sales, record sales, and museum attendance soared. Laws were rewritten to permit works of art and literature to use virtually any language and to stand for virtually any subject, and to protect most whatever kind of speech. American industry doubled its output. Consumer choice expanded dramatically. The income and wealth gap between top earners and the middle class was the smallest in history. The ideological differences between the two major political parties were small-scale, enabling the federal government to invest in social programs. The legal basis for the social and political equality of Americans of African ancestry was established and economical opportunities were opened up for women. And around the earth, colonial empires collapsed, and in their identify rose new contained states.

Every bit conditions changed, then did art and ideas. The expansion of the academy, of book publishing, of the music business organisation, and of the fine art world, forth with new technologies of reproduction and distribution, speeded upwardly the rate of innovation. Almost hit was the nature of the audience: people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The fashion people judged and interpreted paintings, movies, and poems mattered. People believed in liberty, and thought it really meant something. They believed in authenticity, and thought information technology really meant something. They believed in democracy and (with some blind spots) in the common humanity of anybody on the planet. They had lived through a worldwide low that lasted almost x years and a world war that lasted nigh six. They were eager for a fresh start.

[ Return to the review of "The Gratuitous Earth." ]

In the same period, American citizens were persecuted and sometimes prosecuted for their political views. Agencies of the government spied on Americans and covertly manipulated nongovernmental cultural and political organizations. Clearing policies remained highly restrictive. The United States used its financial leverage to button American goods on foreign markets. It established armed forces bases around the globe and intervened in the internal political affairs of other states, rigging elections, endorsing coups, enabling assassinations, and supporting the extermination of insurgents. A cold war rhetoric, much of information technology opportunistic and fear-mongering, was allowed to permeate public life. And the nation invested in a massive and expensive military buildup that was out of all proportion to any threat.

A fifth of the population lived in poverty. The enfranchisement of Black Americans and the opening of economic opportunity to women did trivial to lessen the say-so in virtually every sphere of life of white men. A spirit of American exceptionalism was widespread, equally was a quasi-official belief in something chosen "the American mode of life," based on an paradigm of normativity that was (to put it mildly) non inclusive.

The civilization industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized contained and offbeat culture-makers, and the academy, as information technology expanded, swallowed up the worlds of artistic writing and dissident political stance. At the cease of this menstruum, the country plunged into a foreign state of war of national independence from which information technology could not extricate itself for eight years. When it finally did, in the 1970s, growth leveled off, the economy entered a painful menstruum of aligning, ideological differences sharpened, and the income gap began quickly increasing. The U.s.a. grew wary of strange commitments, and other countries grew wary of the United States.

And yet, something had happened. An enormous change in America's relations with the rest of the world had taken place. In 1945, there was widespread skepticism, even amid Americans, about the value and sophistication of American fine art and ideas, and widespread respect for the motives and intentions of the American authorities. Afterwards 1965, those attitudes were reversed. The United States lost political credibility, but it had moved from the periphery to the center of an increasing international creative and intellectual life.

[ Return to the review of "The Gratuitous Globe." ]

Cultures get transformed non deliberately or programmatically but by the unpredictable effects of social, political, and technological change, and past random acts of cross-pollination. Ars longa is the ancient maxim, but really, fine art making is short-term. It is a response to changes in the immediate surroundings and the result of serendipitous street-level interactions. Between 1945 and 1965, the charge per unit of serendipity increased, and the surround changed dramatically. So did art and thought.

The transformation of American culture after 1945 was not accomplished entirely by Americans. It came nearly through exchanges with thinkers and artists from around the earth, from the British Isles, France, Germany, and Italy, from United mexican states, Canada, and the Caribbean area, from decolonizing states in Africa and Asia, from Republic of india and Japan. Some of these people were émigrés and exiles (in one case, a fugitive), and some never visited. Many of the American artists and writers were themselves the children of immigrants. Fifty-fifty in an era of restrictive immigration policies and geopolitical tensions, fine art and ideas got around. The creative and intellectual civilisation that emerged in the The states after the 2d World War was non an American production. It was the production of the Costless World.

* * *

This is not a book virtually the "cultural Common cold War" (the use of cultural affairs as an instrument of foreign policy), and it is not a volume almost "Common cold War culture" (art and ideas equally reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions). It is about an exceptionally rapid and exciting menses of cultural modify in which the existence of the Cold War was a constant, just only 1 of many contexts.

I had two reasons for writing the book. The first was the historiographic claiming: how to tell a story of change on this calibration. I tried to take into account three dimensions: the underlying social forces— economic, geopolitical, demographic, technological—that created the conditions for the possibility of sure kinds of art and ideas; what was happening "on the street," how X ran into Y, which led to Z; and what was going on in people'south heads, what they understood it meant to make a painting or address an injustice or interpret a poem in those years.

To practice this, I made a series of vertical cross-sections rather than a survey. And I focused on the headliners, the artists and thinkers who became widely known. I practise not think their stories are the only interesting ones, but one of the things I was trying to understand is why certain figures became emblematic. Although this meant leaving a lot out, at that place is a horizontal through-line. The book I concluded up writing is a little like a novel with a hundred characters. Only the dots do connect.

The other reason I wrote information technology is personal. As you lot have probably guessed, this is the menses I grew up in. I was born in 1952. My parents were intellectuals who were mainly interested in politics and whose tastes were not avant-garde, but they were knowledgeable well-nigh what was going on in literature and the arts, and I heard all of these names, or almost all of them, when I was a kid. But I had but a vague idea who those people really were, what they actually did, or what made them important such that people like my parents knew nearly them. Writing this book was a manner of filling in the blanks in my own story. It was (as all history writing ultimately is) a mode of understanding my own subjectivity.

If you asked me when I was growing upwardly what the most important adept in life was, I would accept said "liberty." At present I can encounter that freedom was the slogan of the times. The word was invoked to justify everything. Equally I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom is, or what it can realistically mean. I wrote this book to help myself, and possibly you, figure that out.

[ Return to the review of "The Free World." ]

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/books/review/the-free-world-art-and-thought-in-the-cold-war-by-louis-menand-an-excerpt.html

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