Ken MacLeod alternates insightful posts with drooling paranoiac nonsense but is always entertaining. Today he quotes an article from conspiracy central.

Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it's all a ridiculous hoax? Don't worry. It's meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax. According to American leftist James Petras's review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders [at Marxism-Leninism Today]...

The Nazi attack on 'Degenerate Art' and some similarities between Nazi and Stalinist art have obscured some simple and obvious facts. The 'Degenerate Art' attacked by the Nazis was not the art foisted on us today. (What have the savage cartoons of Grosz in common with the pretentious trivia of BritArt?) One country's heroic statuary is much like another's heroic statuary. Vivid depictions of tanks and tractors, workers and soldiers look rather similar no matter who puts up the posters. (Anarchist and liberal-democratic war posters look just as totalitarian.) We're belaboured with the similarities, but I suspect a closer examination would bring out significant differences. Modern art is entirely compatible with political reaction.

Imagine if the CIA was sufficiently competent to change the whole art world. Hard to imagine isn't it? It would be like herding cats and the CIA hasn't demonstrated competence on the much simpler task of herding sheep.

But there is something interesting about the centuries long conflict about representational art. In the eighth and ninth centuries the Byzantine Empire endured huge controversies about the use of icons, religious representational art. The Iconoclasts (breakers of images) defaced huge amounts of religious art over a period of more than 100 years until the Seventh Ecumenical Council finally resolved the matter in favor of icons according to the teaching of St. John of Damascus. Today an iconoclast is someone who tries to destroy traditional ideas or institutions rather than literally defacing art objects.

The Christian spate of iconoclasm in the eastern empire occurred around the time of the rise of Islam in the east. Islam has always spurned representational art as being idolatrous though there is some private use of images. In both cases iconoclasm wasn't politically reactionary as MacLeod and the MLT crowd assert, it was a progressive attempt to overturn traditions deemed no longer useful, to break with the past. Modern abstract artists certainly didn't see themselves as reactionaries.

A better explanation might be technology based. As first photography, then cinema and now CGI have usurped the traditional role of art for the realistic depiction of people and events some artists have responded with non-representation works. Others have embraced the technologies bringing artistic sensibility to new media.

I think MacLeod's rant is just more sour grapes about the decline of socialism - actually paleo-socialism since there is and always has been dissent among thoughtful socialists about the tragedy of state socialism and the thugocracies that ruled them. He attempts a weak and bitter horse's laugh:

Socialist Realist art now commands higher prices than that of the dissidents and the Western-imitative official art of perestroika. The market has taken an ironic revenge on its votaries.

There is also a mini-revival of some American artists that painted representational art - especially landscapes, Indian and pioneer pieces showing the land as it once was. It seems nostalgic as much as anything.