Title an art exhibit The Nihilist’s Spa and you can get away with pretty much anything while yawning about the pointlessness of it all. If it’s bad, you’ll be derided, but who cares about a pointless value system anyway? So the road’s open. Have at it. Maybe go literal. Show a demolished gallery or some sort of earthly hellscape to offer collective validation of hopelessness, complete with reality television blaring from multiple screens.

Or take the direction of New York-based artists Ernst Fischer and Sandy Smith at Brett Wesley Gallery, which is not easy to discern, despite a poetic artist’s statement spelling it out while not spelling it out. The gallery’s arrangement of Smith’s sling chairs (made with fabric featuring repetitions of the word “is”) incessantly puts you in the moment—a form of existential torture for some, perhaps—while Fischer’s abstract photography, resembling pre-larval goo, will have even the most cheerful optimist asking, “What’s the purpose of this?”