Books Reading: The Gift by Lewis Hyde 📚

During the cold war…

… when Congress failed to support American cultural propaganda, the CIA stepped in. As the director of the CIA’s International Organizations Devision later remarked of one congressional opponent: “He made it very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things that we wanted to do–send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever. That’s one of the reasons why it had to be done covertly… In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.”

… apparently, it made a huge difference for abstract expressionists…