Don’t like the alphabet-soup of generational labels? Get in line and blame Douglas Coupland, Canadian author of the 1991 ‘sleeper bestseller,’ Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The novel coined the term Gen X, a designation so unpopular that its inventor-spokesman has repeatedly tried to walk it back during 35 years of interviews.

Shorthand for the generation born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, Gen X frames an era of continuous coming-of-age marked by political signposts like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf War, as well as cultural landmarks like the AIDS epidemic, LIVE AID, and the music video juggernaut that was MTV. Yet Xers represent the thinnest deli slice of a generational sandwich that sees them vastly outnumbered by Baby Boomers and Millennials – groups whose cultural impact looks to be exponentially greater. Because remembering today is algorithmically constrained, and information cycles super-short, a pair of concurrent European museum exhibitions have taken up the cause for a generation few seem interested in talking about now: ‘Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation’, at the Deste Foundation in Athens from June, and Tate Britain’s ‘The 1990s: Art and Fashion’ from October.

Why look back now? In part, perhaps, because retrospection involves harkening back to a more innocent and carefree time. Featuring the arty doings of the last generation to experience childhood without smartphones and the Internet, the exhibitions at Tate and Deste Foundation remind viewers that life was way simpler before the interwebs (the gaffe belongs to George Bush fils). Here’s a short list of things Gen Xers never had to consider while growing up: Al-Qaeda and ISIS, the steady increase of mass shootings, social media trolls, ICE kidnappings, prediction markets, the return of blood and soil politics, COVID-19, The Singularity, managed democracies, raging climate breakdown, and fake news. The 1980s and 1990s had their own problems but these were tempered by that era’s relative economic security. Going to university was affordable; ditto for starter homes. During the 1970s, the 24-hour news cycle was a sparkle in Ted Turner’s eye. A decade later, asking colleagues about their weekend – the watercooler anyone? – would still elicit ‘good’ instead of ‘busy.’

Respectively helmed by two Gen Xers – former British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, OBE, and Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director at New York’s New Museum – the shows at Tate Britain and the Deste Foundation repeat themes and motifs, but only three artists (Chris Ofili, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Gillian Wearing); consequently, their lists of works evince similarities but shoot off in fundamentally different directions. This is due, in no small part, to the curators’ respective backgrounds and the divergent social histories of Britain and the US. If Enninful’s stylish ‘The 1990s’ celebrates the decanting of DIY-culture’s high energy Lucozade into the champagne crystal of Cool Britannia, Gioni’s artist-led ‘Gen X’ looks to track the responses, issued in ‘varying degrees of sincerity, irony, and even cynicism,’ per the foundation’s press release, of this US-centric group of visual artists the curator has championed ‘ to an ever-accelerating culture that threatened to leave them behind.’

Enninful’s pedigree as a fashion director is all over ‘The 1990s’. The Ghanaian-born British editor and stylist became editor of i-D magazine at the tender age of 18 and subsequently held top posts at W and both Italian and American Vogue. His Tate roundup of the art, photography, and fashion of the decade – the display includes 100 photographs, paintings, films, sculptures, objects, and garments from nearly 70 participants – proposes that we consider the 1990s as a period ‘synonymous with possibility, optimism, and an audacious spirit.’ A boosterish approach to the creative rebellion that followed Britain’s drawn-out recession of the 1980s, this version of the 1990s and the Young British Artists (YBAs) blurs the boundaries between art, design, and fashion in ways that recap some of the evaporating fizz of what was undeniably a heady era. I routinely point out to New Yorkers that, like it or not, the YBAs basically invented their backstory in Britain’s image – enlisting the work of what were then internationally unknown precursors like Patrick Caulfield, Michael Craig-Martin, and Bridget Riley to shape a new version of their country’s recent art history, etching it in stone when their work was hung together in Tate Modern’s first collection display in 2000. Enninful’s curatorial efforts also look to collapse the sometimes irreconcilable differences between post-punk shit-stirrers like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas, and Gillian Wearing and the fashion flash of commercial photographers Nick Knight, Corinne Day, and Juergen Teller, and designers like John Galliano, Stella McCartney, and Alexander McQueen.

Where Enninful’s ‘The 1990s’ is UK-centric, Gioni’s ‘Gen X’ relies on a decidedly American roster of artists drawn entirely from the Deste Foundation’s collection. Among these are one-time ‘It painters’ Elizabeth Peyton, Nate Lowman, and Dan Colen, as well as Pop-Conceptualist performers and filmmakers Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, and Paul McCarthy. One of the exhibition’s general aims is to explore how a specific generation of visual artists responded to ‘seismic shifts’ in politics and technology amid an accelerating, commercialized culture. According to Gioni, the dominant spirit of these artists involved not only ‘lowbrow aesthetics, self-deprecation, and a healthy disregard for convention,’ but also an attitude toward the crafting of visual symbols that ‘completely blurred the line between the underground and the mainstream.’

If the intersection of popular and underground culture is where generations of artists routinely meet, the Deux-Magots-cum-CBGB also functions, predictably, as a common departure lounge. Cue dissimilar 1990s British and American experiments in culture-making. As seen in these two exhibitions, synchronous national developments strongly echo an aphorism commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw: ‘Two countries separated by a common language.’ On the evidence, post-recessionary events in America and Europe were metabolized differently.

Today, the 1990s still represents optimism and a renewed national self-confidence in Britain – a swinging 1960s-style renaissance that was, in time, bolstered by the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. In America, on the other hand, the decade proved polarizing: there were the culture wars, the OJ Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the LA riots. A more accurate picture of America on the cusp of the millennium: Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) with its unequal economic prosperity and the rise of the Internet.

Points of agreement for Tate’s ‘The 1990s’ and Deste’s ‘Gen X’ emerge with both exhibitions offering a portrait of lasting relevance for a generation currently thought to have been eclipsed. Both reveal the cohort’s love or, alternately, obsession with subcultures: ‘The 1990s’ will feature photos of various music scenes and Mark Leckey’s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore; ‘Gen X’ displays drum kit detritus from a poppy Terence Koh performance and Wolfgang Tillman’s 2001 portrait of the maverick German fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. In time, this impulse to fetishize the obscure, and hoard insider knowledge and ephemera would help define social media use, anticipating the basic list making and categorizing that have shaped streaming services like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix. Indeed, the novelist and magazine editor Hanya Yanagihara has likened the 1990s mixtape phenomenon to a proto-‘like’ button and an ur-‘share’ button. 

In the 1990s, Kara Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes channeled the ongoing violence of race relations in the US and elsewhere, and Damien Hirst’s shark-in-formaldehyde perfectly captured the global capitalist sublime. But the era’s most important contribution remains largely unmentioned – in museum exhibitions, award-winning novels, and popular documentaries. It chiefly involves the sublimation of politics into culture, whereby art becomes a conduit for radical ideas and action, and typical Gen X targets like consumerism, gender, or racial inequality are now ubiquitous contemporary subject matter. Following this is the unreflective and relentless mass impulse to share nonstop what the world reads/listens to/watches/drinks/eats/expresses. What happened to the so-called ‘forgotten generation’? In 7.4 billion ways (that’s the number of smartphones in the world today) we are all Gen Xers now.