This text was originally published in The Critic.
Any critic aware of the passage of time must wonder if his judgment can keep up with the world evolving around him. New tastes and ideas emerge from each new generation, and they may not necessarily be intelligible to their predecessors. Contemporary visual art, an art historical periodisation characterised by its diversity and global scope, thrives on novelty and surprise as much as fashion. One need only recall the trademark youth of a generation of Young British Artists who challenged Britain’s stagnant art institutions and market in the 1990s to understand the art world’s obsession with innovation.
This, at least, is a myth propagated to bestow artistic production with the potential to bring about revolutionary change. In truth, the art world has a robust infrastructure for absorbing the ideas of youth into the mainstream. Its celebratory resistance to any challenge that newcomers may pose to the establishment is evident even in the very name of New Contemporaries, Britain’s most significant annual showcase of recent art school graduates. Newness becomes the contemporary, the contemporaneity shapes it.

Most of the 33 artists in this year’s exhibition were born in the 1990s. The line-up is international, mirroring the business models of the UK’s postgraduate art schools. Of the works on show, at least a third concern themselves with heritage and the fraught production of identity. These outlines are familiar. But the “i” word at points feels different than in previous vintages. Varshga Premarasa’s paintings show bizarre scenes like the English village fete staple ‘splat the rat’ game staged inside a museum whose collection comprises portraits of animals. Another has a young woman dressed in a sari next to a humanoid jungle frog. That the painter is keen to tell viewers in the gallery blurb about her Sri Lankan ancestry feels like a passing hangover from art school, because Premarasa can be content with the narrative potential of her surreal scenes.
The video I love you, life. I hope it’s great again, by the China-born Yang Zou who worked as a documentary journalist before turning to art is another example of a shift in how artists use their identity characteristics to produce insights into something else. Zou’s film captures the artist’s journey through contemporary Russia tracing the steps of his uncle who worked in a Soviet steel company in Siberia in the 1980s. This conceit may be true, and one may wonder whether there is anything remarkable about this perspective. But stripped from the art world’s obsession with individual subjectivity, Zou’s film makes for a striking portrait of Russia today that couldn’t be revealed by other means.

I love you succeeds in as much as it fails to heed the formal and conceptual demands of the art world establishment. Even if the same can be said of a handful of other works in the exhibition, the tension between an artist’s desire to individuate on the one hand and acceptance by the institution on the other was laid bare in the protest staged by twenty of the show’s artists at its opening in January. In a walk-out joining a picket of the ICA organised by the pressure group Gaza Biennale, two-thirds of New Contemporaries artists denounced the exhibition’s sponsor Bloomberg Philanthropies for their alleged complicity with the killing of civilians.
Nothing is surprising about this demonstration – the art world is staunchly activist – and no principle of free speech would deny the artists the opportunity to express their views. What was striking, however, was the passionless performance of the speech by the artists Roo Dhissou and Fi Isidore. The art world protest, from the drafting of an open letter to the boycott of the very institution that hosts it, is now a rite of passage endorsed by the art school and the art institution alike. Nobody even notices the hypocrisy of such gestures anymore.
Can one blame artists like Dhissou whose work in New Contemporaries is a dinner party homage to the theorist of emotion Sarah Ahmed? The affectless protest is a Millennial invention. To put it bluntly: the Millennial leadership of New Contemporaries may have been temporarily embarrassed into pretending that they don’t agree with their Generation-Z proteges. In fact, they directly encourage such dissent because it allows them to vicariously live out the fantasy of an art world uncompromised by capital or war. In this fiction, biting the hand that feeds you is the beginning of a feast.
This failed fantasy illuminates the relationship between generations vying for status in the art world. The majority of art world Millennials come of professional age in the era of plenty of the early 2000s. A vast cohort of them graduated with the belief that art was a sure route to self-actualisation. In the past decade, however, most of them have been experiencing an unstoppable decline in their standard of living. Of those consciously abandoning the art world, like the American filmmaker Andrew Norman Wilson who went as far as to suggestthat art itself was the problem, few can hope to find greener pastures elsewhere.
A smaller faction of Millennials is currently ascending into positions of authority within art institutions. As they do, these institutions are crumbling under their feet, losing funding and cultural relevance. This generation is unwilling to understand which of these phenomena caused the other, not least because they would have to take some of the blame. And Millennials are moaning drifters, not revolutionaries. Instead of trying to solve the problem, many of them have placed all their hopes in future generations, forgetting that those Zoomers who are still trying to make it in the Gen-X-designed art world will naturally mimic their elders’ failed attitudes. The legacy institutions’ unreasonable belief in the wisdom of future generations, in the words of the political commentator Amber A’Lee Frost, borders on the paedophilic. Just like the world-saving figure of Greta Thunberg was the cultural creation of her parents, the radical Zoomer is the fetish desire of a middle-aged art school lecturer.
In New Contemporaries, Elliott Roy’s video A Content replaces Another is one of the few works that consciously addresses generational differences. In a series of short sequences framed vertically, the artist captures himself in the style of an online influencer, delivering pithy cultural critiques and art historical morsels while running through the streets of London. The playback occasionally stalls to ‘buffer’, as though even this Zoomer native’s attempts to keep up with his moment were futile.

Roy is also a painter and sculptor. But it is his Instagram persona of Andre Nostalghia that brings his timelines together. One video has him showing off a painting in the carriage of an Underground train. This sequence of gestures – from the brush to the upload button – appears natural because the artist is always present in its mediation. The work and its thirst-trap dissemination (Roy films himself announcing his exhibitions while working out at the gym and appears topless in a portrait on his CV) blend into one, with a hint of knowing irony.
One of the differences between Millennials and Gen-Z apparent in such work is the reach and saturation of cultural experiences that formed the generations’ attitudes. Millennials still had to seek out and consciously make culture (one can nostalgically recall youth club activities that turned children into artists), while Zoomers grew up with ‘always on’ cultural up- and down-streams of social media and entertainment platforms. Zoomers produce and propagate cultural artefacts even unconsciously. Legacy cultural institutions cannot accommodate this mode of creation because they want to claim discernment as their key organising principle, long after they abandoned it. In the exhibition, the trivial pamphlet Publication for Young Visitors by the artist Milly Burrows which, according to the gallery blurb addresses teens at “a vital age at which barriers to the art world are reported”, is the prime illustration of this limitation.
New Contemporaries celebrates its 75th anniversary. The transfer of cultural capital which the exhibition was founded to encourage, however, is not as sustaining as it once was. The art world naturally obscures this breakdown because it staked so much on the Bourdesian notion of inherited taste as the justification of distinction. There are, however, telling accounts by university educators of students outright refusing the experiences the institutions offer while half-heartedly participating in them.
One could dismiss such rejection as an aftereffect of the Millennial, me-centred student activism trend that included the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. But something else is at play, too: plenty of Zoomers no longer want to inherit the cultural capital of earlier generations, perhaps recognising that they will have to wait an incredibly long time to convert it into financial capital. Artists thus need to cultivate cultural worth in a denomination independent of that traded by established cultural institutions. Elliott Roy’s playful mission statement accompanying his video work acknowledges that a programme addressing his generation might intentionally leave earlier ones behind: “I must be eccentric, viral, fast.”
New Contemporaries continues at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London until 23 March. Main image: Rob Harris.