it had to be said

"In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their esthetic heads up the esthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism and institutional critique. Before the schadenfreud-aholics concur, I am not talking about artists like Wade Guyton, Kelly Walker or Josh Smith, all of whom deploy the above artists in optically original and intellectually complex ways, but hordes of wannabe followers who do so in safely imitative unoriginal ways. These second-stringers have spawned a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played...

'Younger' should be much more exciting than it is. For long stretches it is just the same old rote conceptualism and latest iterations on retreaded ideas (curators everywhere love this kind of art). The show is filled with frustrating moments, most of which occur when the curators conform too completely to biennial habit, choosing art that follows standard conventions of late-late-late conceptualism...

'Younger than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free. Even the New Museum itself, founded in 1977, is 'younger than Jesus.' Since it reopened in December 2007, it’s become, despite its clinical spaces and a couple of misfires, the most consistently challenging, polemical art institution in the city. It, like the art in this show and everywhere, is being reborn." Jerry Saltz
"JESUS" SAVES