The artists in this show, were truly avant-garde in their social values, championing the underdogs of history when it was unfashionable to do so. Their politics and style became, in the late 1940s, the subject that dared not speak its name.
This book is "a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of 'ordinary' young Black women" in the rapidly urbanizing USA of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says this reviewer.
This new collection of essays offers an interesting glimpse into the work of this consistently interesting Marxist thinker and cultural critic.
At first glance, modern art and contemporary imperialism make strange bedfellows. The book under review both charts the history of the CIA's work in promoting US corporate interests through its manipulation of culture--what was then called cultural diplomacy-- while also working to define modernism. The reviewer congratulates the author on his first task, but criticizes him on the second.
Socialism has only been able to develop a successful political programme when it has understood itself as a modernising project, working with the grain of technological and organisational progress
Scholars are producing increasingly detailed accounts of how the U.S. government utilized artists and culture in the Cold War anti-Communist crusade. According to former diplomat John H. Brown, this new study, by Greg Barnhisel, shows that an important factor in making modernism work for U.S. Cold War interests involved "defanging modernism of its radicalism and turning it into an international vehicle for whitebread all-American convictions."
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