Dr. Reitman
During the Cold War, cultural production was defined by top down pressures that reduced the agency of artists.
The Communists explicitly undercut people who didn't create Socialist Realism (officially beginning in 1934) like Wassily Kandinsky.
The Republicans clandestinely funded pro-Capitalist artists and ran campaigns against pro-Communists like Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre using the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a CIA front from 1950-66).
The Eastern Bloc and NATO also employed a fascistic method of control. Through popular proxies they funded, activated and protected conservatives, nationalists and xenophobes. These state funded agents attacked anarchists, internationalists and revolutionaries. When these vigilantes actions aligned with the states goals they received funding through CIA fronts or the COMINTERN.
In America, these fascist organizations included the Klu Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. There is significant overlap between the fascistic paramilitary and law-and-order military. As explained by RATM, "some of those who work forces are the same that burn crosses."
In the Stalinist setup, the NKVD were a clandestine, domestic entity serving a unitary executive (so to speak) without the jurisdictional problems that the CIA had to navigate. NKVD agents didn't have to hide their alliegence to Big Brother. The CIA setup needed to maintain continuity of control for the Dulles regime even when democratic elections called for something else.
Dr. Ben Reitman, the man in the photo, was the King of the Hoboes and renowned syphilis doctor--utilizing antibiotics. He was also a free love advocate, anarchist and one of Emma Goldman's lovers. His message was not aligned with the American status quo and he was castrated by vigilantes in San Diego.
In the modern setup, there is seemingly no viable way to create post-modern internationalist realism. It violates the conventions of both Communist and Capitalist worldviews. This piece shows simultaneously too little skill to be science and too much reading to be art.
What's worse? A genAI bot (the upcoming setup) could have created this whole page without developing the standard undergraduate crush on Goldman twenty years ago, reading as many hobo narratives and history as possible, cropping an old photo of Dr. Reitman, driving to Rhinelander on a sunny afternoon and walking the tracks with a dSLR, slapping the whole thing together with bump maps and fractals to make a statement about modernism, realism, apostasy, iconoclasm and permanent revolution.
In our future, there will be no subtext. Only prompts interpreted by the hive mind. Distilled into consumable bytes. This is the ultimate reduction of artistic agency.
The Communists explicitly undercut people who didn't create Socialist Realism (officially beginning in 1934) like Wassily Kandinsky.
The Republicans clandestinely funded pro-Capitalist artists and ran campaigns against pro-Communists like Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre using the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a CIA front from 1950-66).
The Eastern Bloc and NATO also employed a fascistic method of control. Through popular proxies they funded, activated and protected conservatives, nationalists and xenophobes. These state funded agents attacked anarchists, internationalists and revolutionaries. When these vigilantes actions aligned with the states goals they received funding through CIA fronts or the COMINTERN.
In America, these fascist organizations included the Klu Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. There is significant overlap between the fascistic paramilitary and law-and-order military. As explained by RATM, "some of those who work forces are the same that burn crosses."
In the Stalinist setup, the NKVD were a clandestine, domestic entity serving a unitary executive (so to speak) without the jurisdictional problems that the CIA had to navigate. NKVD agents didn't have to hide their alliegence to Big Brother. The CIA setup needed to maintain continuity of control for the Dulles regime even when democratic elections called for something else.
Dr. Ben Reitman, the man in the photo, was the King of the Hoboes and renowned syphilis doctor--utilizing antibiotics. He was also a free love advocate, anarchist and one of Emma Goldman's lovers. His message was not aligned with the American status quo and he was castrated by vigilantes in San Diego.
In the modern setup, there is seemingly no viable way to create post-modern internationalist realism. It violates the conventions of both Communist and Capitalist worldviews. This piece shows simultaneously too little skill to be science and too much reading to be art.
What's worse? A genAI bot (the upcoming setup) could have created this whole page without developing the standard undergraduate crush on Goldman twenty years ago, reading as many hobo narratives and history as possible, cropping an old photo of Dr. Reitman, driving to Rhinelander on a sunny afternoon and walking the tracks with a dSLR, slapping the whole thing together with bump maps and fractals to make a statement about modernism, realism, apostasy, iconoclasm and permanent revolution.
In our future, there will be no subtext. Only prompts interpreted by the hive mind. Distilled into consumable bytes. This is the ultimate reduction of artistic agency.