Figurative Art, PsyOp, and the Battle for Human Existence
PsyOp
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of PsyOp was told to me by a friend who specialized in such things in Iraq. There was a town controlled by local elders, but the US perceived them as the bad guys and were looking for a way to drive a wedge between the city's leaders and the locals. In the city, the plumbing was atrocious and the trash nonexistent. Children were playing in sewage, as there was nowhere else to play, and they were coming down with diseases. The Americans saw that as an opportunity to work on the infrastructure of plumbing and to implement trash collection. The consequences were predictable: children stopped getting sick, and the parents were profoundly grateful. The leadership of the city was outraged and showed their anti-American bias, which sent the message to the parents that their children did not matter. Consequently, the public began to side with the Americans against their city’s leadership. It might be a misnomer, but PsyOp isn’t exclusively a mental exercise. In this case, the Americans had the engineering capabilities, resources, and money to implement infrastructure change in the city for the better.
The circumstances were perfect for the Americans to step in: sick children and sewage. The connection between sick children and sewage is obvious even to the most simple minds. But what happens when the PsyOp, along with power and resources, is used for nefarious ends, and in a field where nothing is simple and obvious, such as art?
In my above example, the Americans came out as the good guys. But when it comes to art and American culture, far from being the good guys, they embarked on one of the most evil psychological warfare campaigns in the history of humankind.
Figurative Art As Effervescent and Evolutionary
Newberry, Hymn to the Sun, 2023, oil, 64×48”. This is one of fourteen paintings so far from my ongoing Space Series. Though Aristotle didn’t connect his concept of “flourishing as an end in itself” to art, I have. To experience a state of being through art that makes life worth living. There are also several innovations in the series: a unique way of working edges and use of line; the application of my color theory with unique variations for every painting; the transparent nature of shadows and how it results in more powerful lighting effects and ease of placing objects in space; and, lastly, the integration of content/subject/emotion with technique, namely: our shadowed self is the stuff of the universe, but it is light that defines us.
Figurative art is one of the greatest, effervescent, and evolutionary phenomena in all of humanity’s advancements, namely humanity's ability for creation. Figurative art integrates thought, emotion, and perception as an integrated whole, a unique thing shared by all the key arts.This integration gives humans the emotional excitement, scientific perception, and reasoning to plan, build blueprints, and imagine future advancements in every field. The little known fact is that art is what set and formed the original network setting humanity on its incredible course.
A well-documented fact is that figurative art preceded written language, formal philosophy, and religion by 30,000 years, so we know with certainty that figurative art was a pillar of humanity’s greatest step in evolutionary development, and likely still is.
Art Is In Our DNA
It’s incomprehensibly magical that young children will start drawing scenes and figures, intuitively and instinctually, without any education, which suggests that the art phenomenon is embedded in our DNA.
"Intelligence" Services and Their War Against Humanity and Art
Yale School of Art Student Exhibition 2024. Why is Yale promoting mediocrity? The answer to that explains why I am an outsider artist. Tragically, when young artists are not taught any skills and worse, encouraged to reject any skill whatsoever, they are mutilated intellectually, emotionally, and perceptually. Instead of tools that enable an artist’s greatest visions, these poor students are fed poison, in the sense that they will never be able to create anything but mangled deformities.
About 75 years ago, American intelligence operatives, either out of grotesque stupidity or a magnitude of evil so vast and large that it’s nearly impossible to comprehend, embarked on destroying every foundation of figurative art. Their rationale was twofold: that freedom was paramount for American culture, even if that meant destroying reason, perception, and meaningful emotional expression. The second part, which was pitch for funding, was that this version of “freedom” was unlike Russian social realism art, so in this case, the intelligence services were the blind leading the blind with government funding.1
What the United States embarked on was, metaphorically, drowning children and the public not only in mental sewage, but in the combination of mental, emotional, and perceptual disintegration. With the parents in the Iraqi city, the cause and effect was obvious to them. But to the American public, the ability to see Abstract Expressionism and postmodern art as poison is nearly impossible. And that’s also twofold: first, because the humanities and the arts are extraordinarily complex and not as simple as sewage and disease as an obvious causation, and second, because of the extraordinary lengths the U.S. government used, all of their money, power, and resources, to promote nihilism in the arts, destroying the ability of any honest, enthusiastic learner from ever gaining the tools to see through the PsyOp.
In my books and writings, I’ve tried to unpack this as thoroughly and deeply as possible, in examples, quotes, reason, and even from passionate angles. It’s kind of tragic that I can see it so clearly: that America was intensely engaged in poisoning our minds through destroying art at every turn. They’ve done it through major institutions like universities such as Yale and Harvard, and contemporary art museums, using the extraordinary power of marketing and propaganda on such a grand scale that it silenced every individual voice speaking out against them.
It is my wish that you exercise your skepticism about American propaganda in the arts, but even your skepticism of my view, in the sense that it challenges you to debate within your own mind whether, indeed, postmodern art and the intelligence agencies are toxic when it comes to culture, art, and humanity.
Michael Newberry, Idyllwild, California. June 28, 2025.
Originally published at my art hub: https://michaelnewberry.com/2025/06/28/figurative-art-psyop-and-the-battle-for-human-existence/
Frances Saunders, The Cultural Coldwar: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
As to Aristotle, in Book VIII of the Politics he did say: "Figures and colors are not imitations, but signs, of moral habits, indications which the body gives of states of feeling. The connection of them with morals is slight, but in so far as there is any, young men should be taught to look, not at the works of Pauson, but at those of Polygnotus, or any other painter or sculptor who expresses moral ideas." So he did make a connection, but he thought that literature and music were more closely connected to flourishing and fulfillment than the visual arts...
The «socialist realism» was a tricky phenomenon. Most of the time, Soviets didn't force artists to paint combines and factories at the gunpoint (although there were lots of nudging and scolding), and people didn't get sent to the gulag just for painting still lifes (people could get in trouble for wrong «class origin» or wrong contacts, but not just for a painting of two apples and a vase).
An artist in the Soviet land was faced with a choice:
- perfect one's skills, make non-ideological art, never acquire much fame or money, die poor; some people took this route;
- acquire somewhat decent skills and take a shortcut and create politically correct art (the Soviet term roughly translates as «ideologically correct/committed»); but there were underwater rocks on this route, too...
...because Soviet art establishment was corrupt as hell, and one had to have the right connections to get the right reviews. There weren't enough laurels for everyone, and naturally many were disappointed.
Enter Western (CIA) offer. Abstract art! Essentially an shortcut to a shortcut. It requires even fewer skills and supposedly less ideological commitment. What they didn't tell, however, was that there won't be enough laurels for everyone able to throw paint at canvas, either.
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whew, that was the longest comment I'd written recently. hope I closed all the parentheses ;)