Alien Emotions.

"The Pictures Generation," at the Metropolitan Museum, revisits a hothouse orchid of an avant-garde that sprouted in art schools in the nineteen-seventies and, by 1984 (the cutoff date for works in the show), had withered in the chill winds of the New York art world. The movement's vastly influential signature method was appropriation: the filching or the imitation of existing images, to sabotage and/or revel in their rhetorical contrivance. Born of recessionary, disenchanted times, Pictures art shared menacingly cynical attitudes toward mainstream culture with punk rock, in night-life venues, and with deconstructionist lucubration, in academe. It yawed between those poles: sardonic burlesque and stilted critique. If any single work in the Met show could stand for all, it would be one of a series executed with minimal labor, in 1979, by the artist Sherrie Levine: fashion ads from glossy magazines trimmed to the contours of the profiled heads of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, and framed. Looking at them, you register the sainted Presidents and the soignee models--and the forms of silhouette and of color photography--in stuttering alternation. Your brain can't grasp both at once. Nor can your heart. The images aren't neutral. They come loaded with political and social associations, bearing on notions of "America." With diabolical efficiency, Levine thus made good on a claim commonly advanced for Pictures art: spurring consciousness of how, and to what ends, representations affect us. Let it be noted that these works do nothing else. As slight and as brittle as they are pure, they demonstrate the limits of critical knowingness as an artistic strategy. The rest of "The Pictures Generation"--photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, installations, sound pieces, films, and videos, plus books, magazines, and ephemera--is comparatively slipshod, though often arresting and occasionally fun. In the unique case of the self-photographer Cindy Sherman, it is transcendent.

Mounted by the Met's associate curator of photography, Douglas Eklund, in the museum's newly spacious photography galleries, the show is largely a story of two gangs of artists that convened in New York. It was plainly heaven, in the SoHo of the late nineteen-seventies, to have been a student at the California Institute of the Arts or the State University of New York at Buffalo. CalArts kids were mentored by the conceptualist and legendary teacher John Baldessari, who, among other assignments, instructed pairs of students to film themselves performing snippets of scripts from old movies. (A projected compilation of the results, "Script," made between 1973 and 1977), evokes an era smitten with the freeze-dried passions of Jean-Luc Godard.) The CalArts star was David Salle, who later gained renown as a painter--a chief colleague and a rival of the paladin of American neo-Expressionism, Julian Schnabel--after breaking ranks with his mostly painting-averse peers. Early works by Salle in the Met show, including a svelte and spooky installation of unnerving photographs (a sneering galoot in a racecar, bare-breasted female African dancers), sentimental music, and flashing lights, well described by Eklund as "like a church of someone else's religion," are a revelation. The Buffalo cohort had a student couple at its core: Sherman, who entertained friends by showing up at gatherings in disguise, and Robert Longo, who was given to movie-inspired icons of macho melodrama. Coming independently to the movement were the stalwarts Richard Prince (a versatile prankster who made an early hit with reproduced Marlboro cigarette ads), Barbara Kruger (with brilliantly crafted feminist agitprop), and Levine (a scandalous success with re-photographed photographs by Edward Weston and Walker Evans, which needled the mystiques of originality and authorship in art). The photographer Louise Lawler merits special mention for her cold-eyed shots of expensive art works in overdecorated apartments--as wince-makingly pitiless as the assessment of a privileged youth, home from college, of his or her parents' taste. For highly comic relief, there are videos by the gifted performance artist Michael Smith, whose "Baby Ikki" (1978) cast him as a diapered tyke crawling on a sidewalk and toddling out into traffic in lower Manhattan, to the amusement of passersby and the dudgeon of a police officer obliged to hustle him--none too gently--out of harm's way. Eklund writes that Ikki stood for the fix of a generation "infantilized as part of their induction into the mainstream ...