Psyops is advertising. Social control-based advertising.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I do enjoy the thousands of words that IanEye posts.
He gets..."it." Whistle while you work...

AMORC and Mind-y...Sirhan...HSCA...

[barracuda]

Congratulations, you just proved people have seen that tacky painting. And that it's in books. Bravo! (I had no idea!)

Thank you for your acknowledgement, and for your valuable contribution to the thread. I had no idea you had such depths within you.

[Trifecta]

Twitter is CIA for semantic agents

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Twitter is CIA for semantic agents

"Samantha" and advertising...post-black list 1962 lawsuit by John Henry Faulk against advertising firm Young and Rubicam for enforcing the witch-hunts and ending many careers...

[jfshade]

barracuda wrote:

But my point of view is that art stands in direct opposition to oppression in all its forms, as it's antonym or obverse; it is the embodiment of freedom of expression, and in that way works intuitively and fundamentally in the world as a liberating influence...

Brilliantly expressed - thanks. Bird lives.

[Code Unknown]

Congratulations, you just proved people have seen that tacky painting. And that it's in books. Bravo! (I had no idea!)

Thank you for your acknowledgement, and for your valuable contribution to the thread. I had no idea you had such depths within you.

In other words (since apparently I have to spell it out for you), your "thought experiment" was a total non-sequitur.

[barracuda]

And again, I'll thank you for your insightful analysis. You've really been hiding your light under a bushel.

jfshade, thank you as well.

[wintler2]

NOBODY agrees with you. ..

Wrong as usual, nice niche you've got there.

Barracuda, your vociferous claims that art somehow transcends propaganda or fascism sounded pretty personal - you haven't by any chance got a personal investment in/dependance on the idea? I've quite a few arty types who claim their endevours are comparable to for eg. direct action stopping logging; i don't agree. Recent decades have seen explosive expansion of arts sectors, yet fascism grows ever stronger. BHP Billitons corporate headquarters here in Melbourne have some stunning landscape paintings, never stopped BHP fucking over numerous landscapes here and OS.


Thanks Hugh. Dunno if i love you more for being the single hardest working contributor to RI, or for refusing to be any more than tart to your abusive and COC-infringing critics, or for illuminating the mechanics of psyops. Strength to your arm. I too read Bernays book recently on your recommendation, best i've read this year.

[barracuda]

Everyone has an investment in their ideas, wintler2, as well as an investment in how the world is shaped by action. I've lived most of my life in the belief of the resonating power that creative culture has in opposition to the destructive culture of militarism, etc. I believe that the appearance of mass media has been formed by the brilliant work of cultural experimenters in ways which most people are unaware, because they see the effect of those influences rather than the wellsprings. These originators are sometimes obscure or esoteric, but more generally just uninvestigated by the consumers and even by the manufacturers of that mass culture, who are often many generations down the line from recognizing of the source they are coopting. These sources of mass media forms are just as influencial as the messages sent to ride along on the cultural carrier wave emanating from the source. Probably more so.

As opposed to Hugh's theorised system, which is like a well oiled machine manned by tens of thousands, the cultural progress is of course one of fits and stops, great leaps separated by periods of languish. Partly because the great leaps must wait for the confluence of great minds in their appropriate moments in time and place. But the effects are spectacular and far reaching.

And really, am I more vociferous or invested in my position than Hugh is in his? I don't think that's possible, do you? And as I said above, I believe in Hugh's work. I think it is interesting and widely applicable. It follows the general rule of critique: how am I looking at what I am seeing? what is the message beneath the message? what am I being told rather than shown? who benefits? etc. Besides, Hugh flourishes in debate - he never shys from it. Left to his own devices, his skillz might not be half as sharp.

[just_dude]

Well not in front of me, but a simple thought experiment should be enough to validate my contention.

Dali's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) was painted in his small studio in Spain in 1936. It is undoubtably among Dali's most famous and popular images, but by no means his most famous. Let us see if we can assess the ripple effect in our culture of this artwork, bearing in mind that altough it is by no means the best example of my contention, it is a representative one.

Let's attempt to estimate the raw number of reproductions of this work that may have been made since it was first exhibited:

- Consider the gallery and museum catalogues. Hard to say. Hundreds?

- Consider the number of general art history books which may have featured this painting. Amazon lists 640 in english alone available in it's catalogue as of today. (These numbers are almost certainly low by several orders of magnitude in consideration of the publishing history of such books over the last seventy years in many languages besides English and many countries besides the U.S.)

- Consider the number of books on Surrealism (Amazon - 220), or on the career of Dali (Amazon - 50), or on the Spanish Civil War (Amazon - 50)

- And how about photographic reproductions of the painting used for illustrative purposes outside of the realm of art history? For example, in books or articles dealing with human emotional states, anxiety, mental illness? I can't really guess, but I know they are plentiful.

- Now consider the number of books printed in each of these editions. The lowest number of a printed edition such as these would be 5,000. However considering the number of art history students in a fair-sized iniversity required to purchase a book possibly referencing this painting such as Gardner's Art Through the Ages certainly some of these numbers appraoch the millions.

- Posters? Art history lecture slides? Postcards?

- How about google searches? For the exact phrase, lest there be any confusion, "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans" I get 11,200 results.

- An image search of the same exact phrase gives me 2,670 pictures, virtually all of them of this exact painting.

- A google search for "Dali" gives 28,100,000 results.

- An image search for "Dali" gives 3,430,000 results.

Now take into account that several generations of individuals have not simply looked at this work, but rather have actively studied it for one reason or another.

And consider that the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the painting has been on virtually continuous display since 1950, welcomes one million visitors per year.

So, keeping in ind that this 40 x 40 inch painting was created by a single individual at a neglible materials cost over a period of a few months with a cumulative number of man-hours likely less than 200, I think you get what I'm aiming at - that the CIA can only dream of getting this kind of ROI from their psyops.



Have you ever seen it before, dude? It is a virulently and explicitly anti-fascist painting.

At what point does this painting stop a war, a bombing, a famine?

At what point does it stop fascism? It doesn't, it never did, not even close.

Hugh has been trying to tell you that the Left is a co=op. They purvey fine arts and give every outward impression that they have a deep appreciation of the dead men's drawings which they sell for millions.

But at the end of the day, there is a war, son, and you have to put away childish things. There is always war. Wanna defeat fascism? Put away the oils and put on your boots.

[barracuda]

That is very nearly the lamest admonition I have ever heard on this board. Put away childish things and put on my boots? Yessir, Captain Dude. Where do I sign up, and what tee vee show did that come from?

You'd do well to keep in mind that after the lies of the chroniclers are peeled away, all that's left of the great military forces of history are carved stones made by men who saw beyond the war, and worked to envision what might come after.

[OP ED]

At what point does it stop fascism?

the point at which, as a symbol, and in and of itself, it inspired the barracuda to stand against fascism.

[supposing "fascism" is your buzzword representing the causation of suffering]

this point, also, is the only relevant point to be made concerning art, its point of affect.

how is that not obvious?

[just_dude]

You'd do well to keep in mind that after the lies of the chroniclers are peeled away, all that's left of the great military forces of history are carved stones made by men who saw beyond the war, and worked to envision what might come after.

Is that from the book "Beyond the War"?

Blue Team, your serve

[just_dude]

At what point does it stop fascism?

the point at which, as a symbol, and in and of itself, it inspired the barracuda to stand against fascism.

[supposing "fascism" is your buzzword representing the causation of suffering]

this point, also, is the only relevant point to be made concerning art, its point of affect.

how is that not obvious?

It is obvious. For every Dali, there is someone with the same materially evident artistic genious who...garners a different kind of fame...and in it a wider range of point-of-affect. Now, I may have spoke in absolutes earlier, and for that I'm sorry. But hey, Red team, your serve

[OP ED]

At what point does it stop fascism?

the point at which, as a symbol, and in and of itself, it inspired the barracuda to stand against fascism.

[supposing "fascism" is your buzzword representing the causation of suffering]

this point, also, is the only relevant point to be made concerning art, its point of affect.

how is that not obvious?

It is obvious. For every Dali, there is someone with the same materially evident artistic genious who...garners a different kind of fame...and in it a wider range of point-of-affect. Now, I may have spoke in absolutes earlier, and for that I'm sorry. But hey, Red team, your serve

wrt the section i've added bold to: such as who?

who among Dali's contemporaries, being overt non-incidental apologists for militancy, can you name?

...

a sincere question. generally speaking, for-the-machine art tends towards the mediocre at best.

what is the primary non-political difference between John Lennon and Toby Keith?


OP ED's answer: your great-great-grandchildren will have heard of Lennon.