Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present

by Pamela M Lee

How the approaches and methods of think tanks--including systems theory, operational research, and cybernetics--paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism.

In Think Tank Aesthetics, Pamela Lee traces the complex encounters between Cold War think tanks and the art of that era. Lee shows how the approaches and methods of think tanks--including systems theory, operations research, and cybernetics--paved the way for a peculiar genre of midcentury modernism and set the terms for contemporary neoliberalism. Lee casts these shadowy institutions as sites of radical creativity and interdisciplinary practice in the service of defense strategy. Describing the distinctive aesthetics that emerged from such institutions as the RAND Corporation, she maps the multiple and overlapping networks that connected nuclear strategists, mathematicians, economists, anthropologists, artists, designers, and art historians.

Lee recounts, among other things, the decades-long colloquy between Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND analyst, and his former professor, the famous art historian Meyer Schapiro; the anthropologist Margaret Mead's deployment of innovative visual aids that recall midcentury abstract art; and the combination of cybernetics and modernist design in an "Opsroom" for the short-lived socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile (and its restaging many years later as a work of art). Lee suggests that we think of these connections less as disciplinary border crossings than as colonization of the specific interests of arts by the approaches and methods of the sciences. Hearing the echoes of think tank aesthetics in today's pursuit of the interdisciplinary and in academia's science-infused justification of the humanities, Lee wonders what territory has been ceded in a laboratory approach to the arts.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Art, Politics, Design

360 pages, Hardcover

Published March 10, 2020

Reviews

[Nat]

In high school, I thought I wanted to be a defense analyst---I had brochures from the RAND graduate school, a subscription to Proceedings, the glossy magazine of the Naval Institute, read Foreign Affairs, and worried that defense spending was in decline. I wanted to go to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and major in International Politics with a specialization in International Security (known as "Guns and Bombs" in the SFS). But I had a kind of conversion experience before college where it became clear that even though I was really interested in that stuff, I shouldn't make a living out of studying it. I studied philosophy and art history instead. So this book is so far up my alley that I need to find a new place to park.

I just finished and really enjoyed How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Tale of Cold War Rationality, and that book gets cited in the first footnote in this book. And the same pictures from the 1959 issue of LIFE magazine appear: RAND wonks sitting on the floor amid mid-century furniture, or playing huge table top war games at RAND HQ in Santa Monica. But I learned that the mid-century furniture is in Albert Wohlstetter's Laurel Canyon house, which was also photographed by Richard Neutra! Those kind of strange overlapping contacts hold the book together and reveal weird angles along which art and the military-academic complex interact.

[Grant Black · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Opsroom, as the brief suggests, is a relic of a failed utopia, a moment in history in which the prospect of aggregating data was equivalent to collectivizing the economy. Its fate would be entwined with Allende's fall and Pinochet's ascendance. It is fundamental, in other words, to a recent history of neoliberalism, where ideology masking as rational enterprise—the view of economics as dismal science—is imported from elsewhere but indivisible from mass atrocity on the ground. Chile, circa 1973, presages the onward march of neoliberalism, typically pinned to 1989 as the before-and-after moment signaling the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chile may well be the Cold War ur-test case of “creative destruction,” generalized to mean the ways that capitalism effectively destroys particular economies, cultures, and ways of life in the interest of establishing new markets.22 For this reason, as Peter Kornbluh acerbically notes, Chile has also become “the ultimate case study of morality—the lack of it—in the making of U.S. foreign policy, of this period.” 23 But just how such history is narrated as a fait accompli or a “neo-fatalist ideology” (in the phrasing of Ernst Mandel) demands closer scrutiny than in generic accounts of the period. And perhaps something as seemingly tangential to this debate as aesthetics and a work of art might shed light on the workings of history itself as discourse, the material of which threatens to slip ever more precipitously into the Cold War past as we stare down the entrenchments of a neoliberal present.”

[Santi Ruiz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Astonishingly overhyped, a great disappointment. Various pieces of archival research tied up with string. No clear thesis advanced, and the linkages between the think tank and the aesthetic movements described are often contradictory, confused, or academified beyond recognition. Some of the most prominent pairings don't pass a cursory smell test: in what ways does Jackson Pollock's reception stateside mirror Sovietologist readings of the USSR? Lee gestures and alludes and hints, but never spells it out, because she can't: it's a terrible analogy with no purpose. That pattern (ha!) repeats throughout.

[Lucas Gelfond · Rating 2 out of 5]

read for Think Tank Aesthetics book club

i was really hoping to like this and expected I would, but ended up really disappointed! doesn't feel like there's a particularly strong argument or thesis throughout, just lots of content strung together. if i'm to take this in really bad faith it feels like Lee is mostly in-group signaling about cool stuff in art history, is pretty dismissive of some of the actual work of the think tanks (only really interested in depiction / refractions of it), and i don't think it makes a great book!