Far far south of Museum Mile in Manhattan, home of the Metropolitan Museum, Guggenheim and other venerable institutions, you’ll find a wonderful new venue showcasing bold contemporary art. It’s down on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at 235 Bowery to be precise.

The New Museum has a very simple mission: new art, new ideas. Happily, my recent visit confirmed the existence of both. From the outset the museum is rather different, from the scrolling LED sign on the exterior to the industrial stairwell, to the somewhat clinical spaces. But on to it’s contents.

Exterior

Interior

Contents

I visited during a recent show titled “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus“, the first exhibition devoted to artists born after 1976. (that is, under the age of 33, Christ?s age at his death).

Covering around 150 works and 25 artists from around the globe the exhibit looks at the output of the often-called Generation Y, sometimes called Generation Me. In countries as diverse as the U.S., China and India this generation represents the largest demographic group to emerge in the last 50 years. So, it’s particularly relevant to examine the diverse artistic output from the successors to the babyboom generation. As one of the exhibit’s curators, Massimiliano Gioni, states,

?The artists in ?Younger Than Jesus? reflect a preoccupation with our future, but also with history and tradition: Rather than foreswearing their parents, they seem interested in imagining new communities and alternative families… Their tactics range from role-playing to recycling, from identity tourism to technological archeology, from an hysterical form of realism to an intimate, micro-emotional art.?

And, as I walked the exhibit several times I was taken by the diversity of the work and the rich use of multiple forms of media. That said, while the media was extremely diverse I could see some common elements: a desire for the artist to express a (sometimes complex), outward looking narrative, an ease and familiarity with the digital tools of the last decade, and a tendency for the art to be derived from other objects rather than to be created from a blank canvas. Commendably, the New Museum, published an enormous exhibit catalog of all the art evaluated for the show, which covered a total of 500 artists. This provided a couple of wonderful peeks: first, into lots of great art that unfortunately did not get to see the light, and second, into that otherwise completely obscure process known as selecting and curating art.

Highlights for me included the following:

Choose, a video art piece, by Ciprian Muresan. Here a young boy from Romania, actually the artist’s son, untainted by the laws of global branding and societal norms, combines Pepsi and Coke in a glass, and drinks the mixture. Don’t try this at home, especially if you live in the northeastern U.S. (Pepsi) or America’s deep South (Coke).

Buying Everything On You (zhou shuping) by Liu Chuang. The artist approaches people on street and buys everything they are carrying and wearing. This is a great snapshot that shows us how much materiality we have in common with other cultures. This reminds me of the photographic project from the mid-1990s by photojournalist Peter Menzel, who coordinated an effort to capture images of entire families’ possessions from 3o different nations.

Interregnum Repetition Resolution (Upholstered) by Steven G. Rhodes. A diverse collection of media including aura portraits, reminiscent of “ghostly” images from Victorian photographers, and an assemblage of technological chaos in a chair.

It Doesn’t Matter by Katerina Seda. A “life catalog” consisting of drawings describing sentimental artifacts recalled by the artist’s grandmother over a period of 35 years.

All images are courtesy of the New Museum, and courtesy of New York city (my thoughts are with you on this day).

If you’re in New York, you’re in luck. If not, I recommend you fly to La Guardia, then jump in a cab and drive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). Buy a ticket, leave the ancient Asian and European artifacts for another day. Climb the beautiful marble staircase, and head straight to the Francis Bacon retrospective.

You will not be disappointed, even if you do not like Francis Bacon’s work. Until the exhibit I had only seen a small fraction of Bacon’s output and was, at best, somewhat disturbed by it. Interestingly, The Met bills the exhibit as “a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992″. Regardless of whose interpretation you feel most inclined to accept, it’s clear that Bacon was very artistically erudite, drawing upon numerous classical references. Further, his personal experiences, especially becoming a young adult in war torn Britain of the 1940s, had tremendous impact on his vision of humanity (or lack thereof). I suspect also that a number of his significant works reflected his tongue-very-much-in-cheek attitude at the art establishment, British society and the church.

So, enough said. Check out the exhibit if you possibly can. It features over 60 of Bacon’s original works and lots more accompanying material. The exhibit, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective end on August 16, 2009. So, be quick, you only have a week to go, and The Met is the only U.S. location for this vast exhibit of Bacon’s work.

Image above: Painting by Francis Bacon, 1946, courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.?

I’m on a temporary assignment in New York city, and it feels like 50 F degrees below zero. So what better way than to spend a couple or three hours in the relative warmth of MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York city’s home to some of the world’s greatest modern and contemporary art.

A large bowl of hearty, steaming hot soup is always a fine remedy for the chills of winter.