How Conspiracy Theories Shape Art

As this convulsive, cacophonous midterm election campaign reaches its end, no exhibition captures the national mood quite like “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy,” a nightmarish show at the Met Breuer.

Its conjuring of American conspiracy theories, through paintings and installations evoking secret cabals and satanic cults, feels all too relevant amid today’s crackpot theories of world leaders running child sex rings in pizza restaurants. Its artists’ examination, and occasional embrace, of wild skepticism appears prescient now that the most violent acts — the murder of students in Parkland, Fla., the mailing of pipe bombs to former presidents — are dismissed as “false flags” even on a leading cable news channel. Its regard for the violence that conspiracy believers may commit feels especially urgent this week, after a terrorist who was convinced George Soros was masterminding a national Muslim takeover walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and assassinated 11 mostly elderly Jews.

And its suggestion that conspiracy is the animus of American public life — and, thus, a natural subject for American artists — lands with particular force as we all swim in the daily flood of half-truths and dubious theories from the First Twitter Account. If this show needed an alternate subtitle, Richard Hofstadter could supply one: The Paranoid Style in American Art.

The proposition of “Everything Is Connected” — nimbly hung by the Met curators Doug Eklund and Ian Alteveer, assisted by Meredith Brown and Beth Saunders — is that artists have a particular facility with the American conspiratorial mode. They understand its baffling flights into unreason; they see past the wild connections to the human frailty that inspires them.

For most of the 30 artists here, any common view of the present is a nostalgic fiction; in place of shared action are suspicion and despair. Those familiar feelings make this a powerful and relevant, but also depressing show, not least for how it dissolves the more activist works on view into a fog of paranoia.