Asia Times Online :: Money Power and Modern Art

Money, Power
and
Modern Art

By Henry C K Liu

(Dec '04 -)

PART 1: Ruthless empire builders
When the Museum of Modern Art reopened in New York last month with a new US$850 million building, it was the latest manifestation of the legacy of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Born and then married into the families who shaped the US economic and business environment for decades, she struck her own path, unlike those close to her who controlled the very nature of money.

PART 2: A monetary coup d'etat
The nature of money has been a controversial issue since the founding of the United States. After the country's first national bank was modeled after the Bank of England came the rise of the robber barons, the opening up of the western US, invention of the Civil War-inspired greenback, and then the year 1913 and the birth of the Federal Reserve.

PART 3: The year of contradictions
It was 1913, the year the US Federal Reserve System was born in a monetary coup d'etat by the privileged classes. Yet in that same year some members of that same class brought to recognition the neglected and derided modern artists of the late 19th century, and there was yet another factor in this contradictory set of linkages: the fight for workers' rights.

PART 4: Modern art and socialism
In order to survive in conservative America, modern art needed to be sanitized of its rebellious social content. In that role the Museum of Modern Art succeeded only too well; it has become a hall of fame for dead revolutionaries, transforming them into harmless icons.

PART 5: Modern art and free expression
Patrons of the arts, not least the Rockefeller family, have given tacit support to the ideal of art as a form of expression. Yet this ideal clashes with the political and moral conservatism often embraced by these same lovers of "art for art's sake".

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