The television is always on, of course, with Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman video running on one channel, Ericka Beckman’s mordant Super-8 childhood skits on another and Mr. Smith’s infantile dramas on a third. Bad news periodically intrudes, as in Thomas Lawson’s painting of a battered child or Sarah Charlesworth’s blurry photograph of plunge-to-the-street suicide. But even without it, escapist possibilities seem bleak in Ms. Simmons’s photographs of claustrophobic Father-Knows-Best dollhouse interiors. The view these artists took of American culture, a mix of cynicism, anxiety and nostalgia, is second nature now. You find it almost everywhere you turn in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, an up-to-the-minute, internationalized echo of The Pictures Generation. Its artists are as young as the “Pictures” artists were then. They do with digital images from the Internet what their older colleagues once did with images cut from magazines. The generational parallels are so many as to be worrisome. Has new art come no further than this? Is it still tilling fields all but farmed out in the past?
