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Any article claiming to offer a definitive account of generational shift should be front-loaded with enough caveats to compensate, in relative scale, for the wild conjecture to follow. So by way of forewarning, let me recount the speech former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen delivered this past spring to my little brother’s graduating class at Wesleyan University. Quindlen was a quick-study of my sibling’s (and my) generation and surely apprised of the fact that Wesleyan was in recent years voted ‘Most Annoying Liberal Arts College’ by the online gossip magazine Gawker – an accolade well-justified, my brother later explained, by classes cross-listed in Environmental Studies and Dance, unisex bathrooms, commune-style dorms and ample, academic use of the gender-neutral ‘ze’ pronoun. Proclaiming this to be the era of ‘gigabytes and gay marriage’, of civic responsibility and an end to prejudice, and asking if Twitter could ever be more than social haiku, Quindlen neither apologized for ‘the mess’ of a world her young audience was being handed, nor gilded ‘the opportunity’ it presents. If anything, she reminded me of the original reason why such university ceremonies are called ‘Commencements’: they rewarded licenses to teach. Commencement, in this sense, marks the shift from being a pupil to a teacher (in more crudely contemporary terms, from cultural consumer to cultural producer – or content-generator, we of Web 2.0 might say). As such, what is being handed out, alongside diplomas and elegant verse, is the expectation of an empowered individualism couched in the emergent terms of an emergent generation. Self-identification and generational-identification, our elders suggest, should be wholly coincident.I confess to being somewhat sceptical of this notion, stemming in part from the fact that ageism habitually manifests in the service of solidifying consumer bases (witness the ‘tween’) and from catch-all terms like ‘Millennials’ – to which Eighties babies like me owe de facto allegiance – which take hazy enough shape that, like astronomical signs and psychic auguries, they resonate with anyone seeking guidance from a larger force. Hypocrisy here compels me to disclose the number of ways I fit the Millennialist credo, from the ‘Me! Me! Me!’ mantra that would preference my living at home with my parents to focus on my art than find me on a long-term career path to financial stability, to the professionalized passive-aggression and paranoid-narcissism that largely emerges from practices of nurturing and individual support (read: coddling) that pervade American liberal education. We Millennials, popular news media further explains, embrace the integrative potential of new technology without the existential angst attendant to Gen X. Our heterosexual men are fretful that women are now a majority in American universities and competitors in the workforce. Lacking traditional realms in which to exert masculine prowess, these Peter Pans immerse themselves in juvenilia and the non-committal ‘hook-up’. Apparently we are also creative, tolerant, and independently minded. One tautology is certain: in eschewing the title of Millennial as a sociological or marketing term, I am reacting as any Millennial would do.Despite the fact that its title hearkens back to a mid-Nineties type of snarky humour, The New Museum’s current The Generational: Younger Than Jesus provides an opportunity to issue more finely hewn theories of the contemporary artist. We young practitioners have inherited an art-world in which all major battles have already been fought, whether on terrains of identity or form: a rhizomatic field, freed from ideological determinism, that we take as an invitation for creative promiscuity. The question, we are told, now becomes which history or set of histories we would rather revisit and whether deadpan, appropriation, satire or bricolage would best service the desired proportion of nostalgic evocation to contingent surplus we hope to effect. These strategies may suggest a unique perspective afforded to those practitioners who believe themselves to occupy the far side of history, in which the benefit hindsight non-discriminately dispenses can transform into a tool for critical retrospection. Yet the constant reliance upon historical recall – a compulsion I would not claim to separate myself from – may also betray a fear of the potential impoverishment of the original means at our disposal.We Millennial Americans are viewed to be bound up in New Sincerity, a term I have always found to originate in the commonly misunderstood equivalence of sarcasm with irony, and which in fact does little more than disguise irony in variably persuasive and twee coats of earnest gloss. And we Millennial Americans have also been party to the ease with which even crasser generalizations of young artists can be erected and replaced, especially when the art market comes to reconcile itself to an increasingly dehabilitated economic climate. As an undergraduate at Yale in the early millennium, I witnessed the secondary and tertiary effects of the Dana Schutz success story, as young painters, photographers and sculptors found themselves hoisted from their cloistered studios – often before their thesis shows – and plopped into the centre of the New York feeding frenzy. These ‘superstars’ were but a mere fraction of the graduate student body, but they were enough to cause a paradigm shift, in the popular eye, from the art school as a critical body to a finishing school. Whatever discussions, whatever incursions into radical, artistic territories students and teachers were endeavouring, the argument seemed to go, these schools ultimately yielded a commercial result that necessitated naked careerism as its predominant cause. An equally reductive formula has taken hold in New York, over the past few months, as the voguish lexicon that previously made art schools so market-friendly – and emergent artists so eminently consumable – has been replaced with recession-friendly rhetoric. While recent essays in The New York Times by Holland Cotter and a discussion of ‘Recessional Aesthetics’ between Hal Foster and David Joselit, this past spring at new non-profit X, have admirably attempted to grapple with the realities and possibilities afforded by this cash-poor moment, they have also risked pre-emptively establishing terminology for a period very much in gestation, partially by reducing the scope of boom-market art to the commercial sector and anticipating a qualitative increase in the art now to come. Such dichotomous reasoning potentially overlooks, among other things, the many American artist-run initiatives and non-commercial ventures that ran concurrently with the most recent market moment, including 16Beaver, Orchard47 and Triple Candie in New York, Fort Thunder in Providence, and Champion Fine Art in Los Angeles.This problem is compounded by the oft-ignored flexibility of the commercial sector and its more enterprising agents, many of whom – for better or worse – have turned to the ‘temporary exhibition space’, the ‘performance series’ and the ‘ephemeral event’ as viable models for current self-accreditation. Of course, many endeavours that have sprung up in New York over the past two years – including Fruit and Flower Deli, Saloon, Cleopatra’s and 211 Elizabeth – exhibit an investment in the legacies of counter-institutional entities; yet it nonetheless can prove difficult to separate the seriously-minded from others aspiring for credibility simply by resembling the signs of the times. As a young artist who has been a beneficiary of many of these emerging phenomena (yes, including the Younger than Jesus directory), I certainly don’t intend to bite the feeding hand, but rather maintain some suspicion about the rhetoric surrounding the emerging discourses in which I am both compulsorily and voluntarily a part. I may remain hesitant about the validity of periodic categorization, but insofar as we Millennial practitioners lean as heavily upon history as our biographers claim, I take some encouragement in knowing that the lessons and precedents comparable moments of the past afford will not now be far from mind.Tyler Coburn (b. 1983) is an artist and filmmaker, based in New York.