Missing part of the point
Just noticed a rather old article in BBC's culture section. There's plenty of evidence that "modern" "art" was used as a cultural weapon by CIA. Several CIA-owned foundations helped to fund the "artists" and helped to spread their "work" to Europe and the Soviet Bloc.

Jazz was used similarly without any pretense of secrecy. (See Willis Conover.) Not surprising that "modern" "art" would run the same way.

Many Americans considered "modern" "art" to be a Commie tool. Cleon Skousen included it in his list of Commie attempts to break down American society. He was right about the Commies but misattributed the source to Russia. (And I was dumb enough to go along with him.)

Commies in America were always working primarily for OSS/CIA/FBI. It's the good old Globalist Tripod. Banks, Intel, Leftists. Some were also working with Russia at times, because Russia has always been happy to help weaken America. But Russia was not the source of these ideas. CIA and internal Leftists have been the CONSISTENT source of chaos.

The BBC article speculates about the purpose:

According to Anfam, it is easy to see why the CIA wished to promote Abstract Expressionism. “It’s a very shrewd and cynical strategy,” he explains, “because it showed that you could do whatever you liked in America.” By the ‘50s, Abstract Expressionism was bound up with the concept of individual freedom: its canvases were understood as expressions of the subjective inner lives of the artists who painted them.

As a result, the movement was a useful foil to Russia’s official Soviet Realist style, which championed representative painting. “America was the land of the free, whereas Russia was locked up, culturally speaking,” Anfam says, characterising the perception that the CIA wished to foster during the Cold War.

Doesn't make sense. Very few Americans want to "do whatever you like", and nobody except the "artists" saw any purpose in scrawling and scratching random shit and calling it "art". Americans and Russians, like all rational people, want art to be a beautiful and orderly representation of reality. The job of art is to ADD order, not subtract. We were getting what we wanted from commercial artists, so we saw no reason to value the CIA-sponsored chaos. Russians were getting a better deal in terms of officially sponsored art, so they had even less reason to want abstract ratshit.

A much simpler explanation: CIA, dark heart of Globalism, wants to spread chaos and death everywhere because CIA is evil. The real target of "modern" "art" was domestic, not foreign. It was convenient to blame the Russkies, and the Russkies were dumb enough to help with the blame.
  ¶ 8:52 AM