Met Breuer: Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy

Met Breur is Metropolitan Art Museum’s space for contemporary art located on the Madison Avenue. The modern building that looks like a descending stair from the outside took its name from the Hungarian architect Breuer who designed the museum. 

The exhibition “Everything is connected: Art and conspiracy” gathers contemporary artists’ works during the past fifty years questioning the relation between the hidden exercise of power and citizenship. They criticise the manipulation of power exercised by the US, the conspiracy and its political and military intervention at the very corner on earth. The exhibition opens with the portrait of Oswald, the suspect of J.F. Kennedy assassination and right next to it another portrait of a man who killed him: the strip club owner Ruby was quite friends with the Dallas Police office where Oswald was arrested and he killed him right after he was detected. It is as if these people were just used as a pawn and they were only figures for the public opinion to distract attraction. Could the assassination be a punishment of Kennedy’s soft policies with Cuba, the Soviets and his critical stand to Vietnam war? 

As we continue we see other works criticising US military’s acts in Abu Gharib prison, CIA’s intervention in Latin American coups such as the 73 coup in Chile. 

An interesting work belongs to Canadian artist Johnson ‘House on Fire’ which is a small model of a house with a burning roof and rooms upside down. The artist’s grandmother suffered a physiological disorder and was held in a hospital during the 50’s under the control of a renewed psychiatrist. She was subject to many harmful treatments such as electro shocks, sleep deprivation, and LSD and other chemicals. She later learned that she had been a part of a test group to test this chemical within CIA’s mind control programme and was forced to this trauma involuntarily… 

Next to it another interesting work of the American artist Shaw who covers a whole wall with a picture of a standard American town but covered with a red spider network, as you enter inside the door you see some small creatures sitting by the fire representing people making money out of nothing, a critique of neo-liberal policies and the public opinion unaware of the hidden mechanisms that rule their lives.