ARTISTS IN THEIR YOUTH.(The Talk of the Town)(art exhibitions)

"School Days," a new group exhibition featuring the work of nineteen graduate art students at Hunter, Columbia, and Yale, definitely qualifies as an art-world event. Granted, the frenzied search for new talent has had dealers and collectors invading college campuses for several years now, but here was the next generation invading Manhattan, and not in some makeshift Tribeca garage but at the Tilton Gallery, on East Seventy-sixth Street, on two floors of the grand town house where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were married. The opening was packed with young people in festive getups, many of them holding cold bottles of Rolling Rock and displaying masterful tattoos. Janine Cirincione, the gallery's director, looked elated and a trifle stunned. "Mike Ovitz was in yesterday and bought two paintings," she told me, straining to be heard above the din. "About seventy per cent of the work is sold. I don't really know what to make of this."

The art on the walls didn't look like student work. The paintings ranged in size from large to very large, with figurative images outweighing abstract ones by a wide margin: a lot of visionary landscapes and enigmatic narrative scenes. There was one smallish sculpture, surprisingly little photo-based work--the notable exception being a giant, two-panel color blowup of the much abused call buttons in an elevator in Novgorod, Russia--and only two video pieces. What passes for college humor these days was limited to a realist painting called "Yale, Bad Idea," which showed a middle-aged guy in a Yale sweatshirt shielding his eyes from the sun. The work all looked very accomplished. No amateurish pratfalls here, nor any big risks taken.

"It's a challenge for me to be in these surroundings," said Titus Kaphar, a merry-looking Yale student wearing a yellow sweater, a vest, a very short necktie, and a tweed cap. "A lot of insecurity. You do what you do and hope somebody, somewhere--you know."

"Everything I have here is on ...