Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy
September 18, 2018–January 6, 2019
This intriguing exhibition catalogue reveals how artists since the 1960s have used their work to oppose political corruption, bureaucracy, and media manipulation.
Buy NowFor the last fifty years, artists have explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between the government and its citizens that haunts Western democracies. Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy is the first major exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic. It traces the simultaneous development of two kinds of art about conspiracy.
The first half of the exhibition comprises works by artists who hew strictly to the public record, uncovering hidden webs of deceit—from the shell corporations used by New York's largest private landlord, interconnected networks encompassing politicians, businessmen, and arms dealers. In the second part, other artists dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that nevertheless uncover uncomfortable truths in an age of information overload and weakened trust in institutions.
Featuring seventy works by thirty artists in media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, from 1969 to 2016, Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy presents an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy is accompanied by the exhibition Jane and Louise Wilson: Stasi City, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from September 18, 2018, through March 31, 2019.
"It's a beautiful piece of museum choreography." —New York Times
" . . . one incredible artist after another . . . " —British Journal of Photography
" . . . a prehistory to our current sense of paranoia and dread." —Burlington Contemporary
"Overdue and right on time . . . " —4Columns
" . . . bizarre, ingenious, mesmerizing . . . " —Al Jazeera
" . . . as much a reckoning with our past as a road map of our current era . . . " —Surface
" . . . explore[s] how fragile our grasp on reality can be under the knuckles of institutional malfeasance . . . " —Brooklyn Rail
The exhibition is made possible by Andrea Krantz and Harvey Sawikin.
Additional support is provided by James and Vivian Zelter.
The catalogue is made possible by the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Inc.
Lutz Bacher (American, born 1943). The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (detail), 1976. Collage in 18 parts, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) each. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Anonymous Gift, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York (1999.387e). © Lutz Bacher
