The work doesn't have to be outstanding - it just needs to believable enough to fill the niche.

Problem is, a lot of contemporary art has become an exercise in verbal self-justification and marketing rather than an exercise in visual creativity.

I guess art school doesn't really explain that Show Don't Tell thing any more.

It can hardly be a "standard" weapon to attack any art you don't like. We're talking about a specific period and a specific covert CIA programme, which included painting and music, to promote US interests on the cultural front:

"In 1950, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surreptitiously created the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) to counter the Cominform's "peace offensive"(Wilford 101). The Congress had "offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances" at its peak (Saunders 2000). The intent of these endeavors was to "showcase" US and European high culture, including not just musical works but paintings, ballets, and other artistic avenues, for the benefit of neutralist foreign intellectuals (Wilford 102)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_CIA_and_the_Cultural_Cold_War

Though this was a huge programme, the CIA's role was covert - see the quotation in afew's comment above.

Nobody sensible claims that such a connection of itself "discredits" something; the CIA funds some important scientific research, even Chomsky has benefitted from Department of Defense funding:

"Chomsky's research was conducted in a laboratory funded mainly by the US military - the `Research Laboratory of Electronics' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The preface to Syntactic Structures concludes:

`This work was supported in part by the U.S.A. Army (Signal Corps), the Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research and Development Command), and the Navy (Office of Naval Research); and in part by the National Science Foundation and the Eastman Kodak Corporation.'(3)"

http://libcom.org/history/noam-chomsky-politics-or-science

However, the long-neglected but now well-established fact of covert CIA funding for Abstract Expressionism does help to explain its quite rapid (if brief) success. Part of the reason for the secrecy was that, despite being presented as symbolic of US individual freedom, abstract expressionsim was not at all popular with the US public and some populist US politicians attacked it.

In The Painted Word Tom Wolfe makes no mention of the CIA and focuses on discrediting the theory behind AE and subsequent movements (whose propagandists themselves attacked the theory behind AE, as not going far enough). He did so very well, despite the bleating of the proponents of the various contending theories.


Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.