{"id":808,"date":"2009-10-01T20:59:36","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T01:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/?p=808"},"modified":"2011-07-30T21:22:11","modified_gmt":"2011-07-31T02:22:11","slug":"the-generational-younger-than-jesus-at-the-new-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/01\/the-generational-younger-than-jesus-at-the-new-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at The New Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Auction houses are gravitating towards mature artists and critics have sounded the death knell for the \u2018young art star,\u2019 but the New Museum<\/a>\u2019s first triennial still carries the torch for youth with its showcase of work by fifty international artists, all thirty-three years young or less. If this extravaganza of newness suddenly seems a little out of touch, the show\u2019s curators insist that they\u2019re following the lead of sociologists and marketers in examining the Millennial identity, intending to show it as a generation of producers, not just the consumers they\u2019re made out to be.\u00a0 It falls to one of the generation\u2019s own to honestly portray his contemporaries as consumable; Matt Keegan\u2019s year-book style photo portraits of recent college grads, fresh faced and earnest, tellingly point out that their lives are, as of yet, still largely unlived.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s why, despite input from fifty artistic voices, the generation\u2019s defining characteristics stay hazy, regardless of the curators\u2019 anthropological efforts.\u00a0 Artists like Liu Chuang get in on the investigation with a creepy, clinically neat display of personal effects he purchased from unknown women on the street.\u00a0 Fellow Chinese artist Chu Yun takes a reverse approach, inviting women to sleep in a bed in the gallery, presenting us with a person but no information on who she might be.\u00a0 Ryan Gander\u2019s blood-flecked white tracksuit worn by one of the museum\u2019s guards is one of the show\u2019s best pieces, primarily because it creates a compelling, if fictional, identity for its wearer.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s two most ambitious, riveting and unsettling works loosely relate to what the Millennial dossier does make clear: that the under-thirty population around the world is booming and its perception of social relations has been radically altered by the Internet.\u00a0 Cyprien Gaillard\u2019s video of two large rival gangs in a sprawling, organized fight amid Soviet-era high-rises taps into fears of a generation out of control.\u00a0 Less alarming but no less alienating, Ryan Trecartin\u2019s two-room bachelor(ette) pad is an eccentric setting for fast-paced videos in which zany characters act out personal dramas in a world of their own.<\/p>\n

Josh Smith\u2019s hastily produced, collaged abstractions are a painterly version of this overdrive, though their installation in a huge, pretty grid neuters their disregard for art making tradition.\u00a0 Appropriation and recycling also plays into Elad Lassry\u2019s whimsical, ad-inspired images that evoke Sara van der Beek\u2019s carefully constructed setups and Roe Ethridge\u2019s mood-creating series but with more humor.\u00a0 Cory Arcangel\u2019s gorgeous, fakey cyan abstraction\u00a0 (a default pattern from Photoshop) resonates with Tauba Auerbach\u2019s process driven paintings, which recall Liz Deschenes\u2019 op art patterns and Eileen Quinlan\u2019s abstract setups in their adherence to a set of parameters established by the artist.<\/p>\n

But the Generational isn\u2019t the context for artists who are in conversation with their slightly older peers and its homogenizing approach to art from around the world assumes a global, artistic lingua franca, devoid of contextual details, that probably doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 Several works echo better known artwork or familiar ideas, they appear to be fragments of a more complex practice, or simply beg the question of why they\u2019ve been chosen to represent a generation.\u00a0 The show\u2019s premise is more compelling than its content, its flip title promising big ideas that the artists themselves don\u2019t even aim to produce.\u00a0 In a recorded introduction to the show, one of its curators says that today\u2019s super-abundance of art product forces a redefinition of \u2018new,\u2019 though it may be better to ask if we should continue to expect the youngest artists to be the chief suppliers of \u2018newness\u2019 or original artwork in tune with contemporary life.\u00a0 Because to judge by this show, art\u2019s obsession with youth is past its prime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Auction houses are gravitating towards mature artists and critics have sounded the death knell for the \u2018young art star,\u2019 but the New Museum\u2019s first triennial still carries the torch for youth with its showcase of work by fifty international artists, all thirty-three years young or less. If this extravaganza of newness suddenly seems a little … <\/p>\n

Read more ““The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at The New Museum”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[24],"tags":[8,29,18,9,15,14,13,12,36,33,17,10,16,34,11,35],"class_list":["post-808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-art","tag-art-criticism","tag-artist","tag-contemporary","tag-critic","tag-exhibition","tag-gallery","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-painting","tag-photography","tag-sculpture","tag-tour","tag-tours","tag-visual-art","tag-visual-arts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BDOD-d2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}