what do you have to say about the GI Bill – inquiring minds want to know!
BRIEFLY: the U.S.
dominatedcolonizeddominated the postwar art economy because the U.S. profited off of World War II. The war basically obliterated France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Hungary (pre- and interwar “art capitals”); the U.S. spent and made a lot of money both destroying and rebuilding Western and Central Europe without really sacrificing much of anything. (France was really bummed about it and French art critics always hated Abstract Expressionism for like being a threat to their dominance, it’s all really stupid, there are books about it and they use a lot of atomic bomb metaphors and talk a lot about a Cold War Struggle for Cultural Supremacy in ideological terms, it’s really cute and kind of cloying.)On top of that, basically every “important” (whatever) artist of mobility moved from German or Hungary and then was paid by the U.S. government to be great in order for the U.S. government to demonstrate that American Freedom is great. (Again, there are lots of books about this Creative Cold War. There were proposed world tours of Pollock paintings to show how “free” Americans could be. There was literally an international touring production of Oklahoma! paid for by the government.)
Practically all of Bauhaus was transplanted to the U.S. during World War II and were given grants to found the biggest and most globally dominating art and design institutions: Albers and everyone else ended up at Black Mountain and then later Albers founded the Graphic Design program at Yale, which many people argue invented Graphic Design as a field. MIT snapped up Gyorgy Kepes, Illinois Institute of Technology got Moholy-Nagy, Rudolf Arnheim got a Guggenheim fellowship, etc. Basically, these are like the most “important”/influential art theorists and designers of the latter part of the twentieth century. (And the architects! So many of them!) The United States essentially bought a bunch of German, Soviet, and Hungarian artists in order to exploit their expertise in developing an advanced capitalist art economy. And it worked really, really well.
(Note especially that people like Kepes were not only hugely influential in fine art theory, but were actually some of the most important figures in the development of an ideology of design consumption, ie, Art That People Buy, like interior design and trade paperbacks, which is another thing I know a lot of things about. This symbiosis between consumption and art meant everything to advanced capitalism, and it was linked to the bulging white middle class in the U.S. after the war. $$$$$$ art $$$$$ etc.)
The GI Bill was part of this. The U.S. was trafficking in expat experts in order to basically steal cultural infrastructure from Eastern Europe. But when the war ended, the U.S. a) was mostly in one piece, unlike France b) had a lot of veterans and c) actually had the money to give them their promised benefits. (???? i know!) (***if they were white)
One now-defunct GI Bill benefit (I’m paraphrasing and pulling this from the top of my head, so don’t hold me to the details) paid for the art education of any veteran. Like, if a veteran was accepted to study under any artist in any institution in the world, the U.S. would pay for them to do so. A lot of the most important post-war artists—Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, etc.—went through this program. All this money, for the most part, went right back into American institutions. (This is more or less when they invented the M.F.A.) (Rauschenberg, Indiana, and Lichtenstein all ended up at major U.S. institutions in teaching or administrative positions, and Indiana especially was really active in state-sponsored public art.)
Basically, because of this, the U.S. built a global art economy which was entirely founded on an education and production model that was developed in New York and Chicago (mostly). It was built on the labor of people that couldn’t live in the countries that they lived in before or during World War II, but it centralized the U.S.’s dominance over all of those home nations. It streamlined, professionalized, and capitalized a global art economy.
Important things to note:
- people who could not migrate to the U.S. or were not paid to migrate to the U.S. did not get trafficked in this way
- like, a lot of people died in the war, you know? most of them weren’t Americans though.
- the U.S. was only paying white men to build their art empire
- in the case of German expats, consider Eva Hesse—who fled to the U.S. and was never offered much of anything—or Anni Albers, who was an established artist with the Bauhaus but was not, you know, given a job at Yale
- most of the people who received GI Bill benefits were white men, so this economy re-embedded a white male supremacy into the art world
- expat artists from other impacted nations (like Yayoi Kusama, for example) were rarely granted the same opportunities. this is in part because of racism and colonialism, but it also has to do with Cold War alignments
- this path of education toward professionalism created and refined the filtering system by which people were given access to art institutions
- this is the process by which American liberal arts education models co-opted Eastern European art education models and turned them into an industry
There are other narratives (like the legacy of the New Deal, like How New York Art Institutions Eventually Ate Themselves, like How The U.S. Co-opted 21st Century Chinese Dominance of An Art Market). But this one is huge.
blah blah blah
state —- capitalism —- consumption —- art —- labor —- stateI did all of that off the top of my head. PAY ME.