Abstract:

The paper examines the nature of secrecy based on an art project by Nicola Atkinson-Griffith. It applies the idea of political obfuscation and shows that it can be cast as a policy of secrecy. This is illustrated by the CIA’s Cold War cultural policy in the 1940s and 1950s that made Abstract Expressionist painting the American art form and which came quickly dominate Western aesthetic culture. This policy was neither suggested by a majority of voters nor by the political establishment. A brief discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Orwellian Loop concludes the paper.