Artnet explains their understanding of Qanon and conspiracy related to art. Article is too long to post in its entirety. I have heavily edited this post for length. Worthy read.
Why Conspiracy Theories Have Become the Most Influential Art Form of Our Time
Part 1 of a 2-part essay on art theory and conspiracy.
This is going to be a longer essay than I initially thought I’d write about conspiracy theory. It began in my head as me thinking about a few points I would have added to something I’d recently written explaining the unexpectedly virulent online conspiracy theory that the performance artist Marina Abramović is secretly at the center of a Satanic mind control plot.
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The obvious reason the topic comes up right now will be clear to anyone who reads the news: conspiracy theories of various kinds are literally moving people into the streets right now. The recent wave of #ReOpenAmerica rallies were festooned with signs about -QAnon– and a coup plot against President Trump. Meanwhile, the president himself is promoting the idea that COVID-19 was deliberately released from a Chinese lab, and mobile phone towers are being attacked out of a belief that 5G internet spreads coronavirus.
What accounts for the intensifying grip of conspiratorial thinking in the present?
“Conspiracy theory” is customarily a term used a bit the way people used to use the term “hipster”: always to dismiss someone else’s tastes, never to describe one’s own. This gives a kind of infinite regress quality to the attempt to criticize it, as if two mirrors have been placed facing one another: conspiracy theorists will argue that the term “conspiracy theory” itself was invented by the CIA to discredit seekers of the truth about the JFK assassination—a claim which, in turn, seems to be a conspiracy theory.
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The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are the three classic “transcendentals” of Enlightenment thought. Whereas “conspiracy” thinking is often described as an irruption of the irrational, the place to start in understanding it is not its irrationality, but how it directly answers the hunger for each of these three cardinal values.
The Political Dimension
The Cold War liberal historian Richard Hofstadter is the go-to reference on this first, most obvious factor accounting for the intensification of conspiracy, via his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” There, Hofstadter charts how fantasies about Catholic cabals, Freemasonry, and foreign plots have been a deep, animating feature of US political life.
Sharp critics have pointed out problems with Hofstadter’s framing of the “paranoid style”: Chris Lehmann, writing recently in the New Republic, showed how his enduring popularity is due to how he conflates left- and right-wing populisms; in another register, Eve Sedgwick’s classic argument about “paranoid reading” damns Hofstadter for idealizing a rational political center-ground that does not exist.
But I appreciate the clarity of this line from Hofstadter’s famous essay: “[The] central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency,” he writes, “is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”
This provides a credible mechanism to explain the rise of conspiracy in the present: as inequality has set record-busting extremes in the US, a variety of not-at-all radical commentators have declared that we live in an oligarchy rather than a democracy, given that the preferences of ultra-wealthy people and big corporations seem to rule our public institutions.
Out of Shadows, the wildly popular YouTube conspiracy film linking Abramović to Satanism I talked about in a previous piece, actually stops its speculations about MK-Ultra and Anton LaVey dead at a certain point to present a long clip of beatnik comedian George Carlin, a 2005 riff beloved by lefties.
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It seems clear that conspiracy theory gains plausibility as the gulf between the outward rhetoric of politics and the felt reality of how institutions actually function grows; antique national narratives about an “American Dream” seem to be doublespeak covering over some deeper and malicious reality; the fantasy space is thus ripe to fill up with all kinds of dark images.
https://news.artnet.com/opinion/why-conspiracy-theories-have-become-the-most-influential-art-form-of-our-time-part-i-1854738?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=US%2010:02%20a.m.%20newsletter%20for%205/11/20&utm_term=US%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BMORNING%5D