My Library

diplomatic rank were expected to have political orientations, but workers within the Secretariat were expected not to have them. I don’t know if this is true today, but it was the case in 1958 when I first entered the UN as a worker there. Many who read this will think I’m jesting about the Marxist infiltration and domination of the art world. Many believe artists are above politics -- and many are. But there is a distinction between mere artists and those who manage the big business of culturalism. Many have told me to my face that politics and art do not mix and are NEVER mixed. Well, politics are everywhere, and mixed into all things -- and all can be as sure of this as they are of their daily bowel movements. In any event, during the 1970s a number of books finally began came out revealing the dimensions of Marxist power and influence in the New York art, literary and architecture establishments from the 1920s through the 1960s. For example, the witty author, Tom Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus To Our House (1981) refers to the "Marxist mist" that vaporously occupied the mental equipment of culturati. A well-documented overview is found in David Caute’s The Fellow Travelers: A Postscript To The Enlightenment (1973). Caute illustrates the lines of Marxist cultural influence from France to England and the United States. William Barrett also dissects many aspects of the culture-making Marxist/Communist aesthetics in his book Time of Need: Forms Of Imagination In The Twentieth Century (1972). But as of 1967, although I understood political stuff did go on in the art world, it never dawned on me that it could be THE reason MY work was completely unacceptable.