I CIA U

You know when paranoid idiots say that the security services have direct sinister involvement in even the most trivial aspects of our lives, such as the silly films we watch? The blithering twat-pots? Well,  as Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham observe, sometimes they’re right. I already knew the CIA slime had funded the film of Animal Farm, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing each time I read it.

Orwell would, I still feel sure, have venomously vetoed the move had he still been alive. Jackson Pollock, however, was definitely funded by them whilst still breathing, and was fully aware. I have always liked his work, and continue to do so. Yet the taint of association does leaves more than just a bitter after-taste. The work is diminished. It is more damaging to an artist when they have been bought by evil interests, than if their views were vile of their own volition. The noxious beliefs of Larkin, Lovecraft, Celine, Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Wyndham Lewis were their own free evil, a fetid flame that in many cases ignited their brilliant muse. In the other camp, the blind eye turned by Brecht, Sartre, Auden, Picasso, and Patrick Hamilton to the not-by-then concealed horrors of Stalin may have been borne by aplaudable idealism, but the myopia had turned pretty rotten in the end. Yet still,  they were all their own men.

Pollock, and, to give another stray example, Dali, were not their own men. Great talents but utterly prostituted, for all their flamboyant individuality they were pushing pens and brushes to corporate order.

I still like looking at Dali’s work though. And, dearly beloved Christ, I still enjoy watching Spooks. But we must remember that certain artists, and certain TV series, whatever thrills we get from them, are essentially whorish hokum. And we mustn’t forget also that it is not just fascism and communism that have been implicated with the deaths of millions of innocent people. So has the CIA, and the killing continues.