No doubt their frustration was multiplied when the curtain was thrown back to reveal what is, really, a very good show, highlighted by the other consensus All-Star selection, Cyprien Galliard’s mesmerizing video, which, let me point out, needs no qualification as to the age of its author. It is one of numerous videos that constitute the strength of the show, including excellent work by Ziad Antar, Tigran Khachatryan and Ciprian Muresan; the last of whom’s Choose is an especially elegant metaphor for something, I’m sure. YTJ may end up, once the usual chatter burns off, being remembered as a sort of coming out party for the arrival of video as a dominant medium. (Peter Schjeldahl says something similar)

But returning to the question at hand: perhaps the reason so few of these artists seem out to burn elderly bridges is because so few of them are performing as youngsters here. Ignoring the myriad identity positions not registered on curatorial placards - (imagine: Joe Artist, b. 1983, Boston, largely homosexual, 10 percent Irish, 40 percent German, 50 percent Antiguan, combined parental income at birth: 133k) there are 25 nationalities in play here. With so many artists speaking from positions embedded in the fabric of race, class, gender and nationality, their (relative) youth often seems like the last thing on anybody's mind.

And this is liberating, in a way. After all, it is always the second-order theme that comes to the fore in a group show, eclipsing the declared intention. Thus when we see Iranian artists, say, grappling with issues of secularism, or American artists concerned with branding, it is these secondary themes that become the story.

By inaugurating its own fountain of youth, the New Museum has also relegated that very conceit to the level of organizing principle, allowing, in some cases, more relevant factors to appear.

More pragmatically, we see the museum granting itself a center position in regards to highly visible career debuts, with potentially game-changing results. The younger artists in the show foolish enough to accept representation at unknown or shady galleries consequent to this exhibition may in fact do so out of the same pressure at fully acclimating to a premature professionalism that the aspiring gallerists who sign them will feel, staking a claim on the newly annexed territory. At first, everyone seems to benefit, and cracks in the edifice are difficult to see. But who, after all, shows up to the debutante ball in any but their finest garments -- rented or not?

This is not to say that opposition is impossible, only that it is somewhat strange to ask for it by name while ferreting out its every possible hiding place. I mean, add the Generational to the Whitney Biennale, and what aspiring artist has time to oppose anything? Perhaps the millennials are the first generation to be so completely bought off - perhaps charmed is the more polite phrase - by shows like YTJ. This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing; we do, after all, have to consider the possibility that after years and years of oppositional art practice, the paradigm itself has been neutered by its own success. Not that there is nothing to be opposed to, only that opposition is no longer of the meta-contextual kind, that context having expanded, laudably, to include that which once stood outside, banging out a beautiful rhythm on the barricaded door.