Ryan Trecartin, 26, Video and Sculpture Artist
“I have that high-school thing of really believing that everything is art,” says Trecartin, whose campy, candy-colored installations are ripe with convoluted plots, existential one-liners, sexual misadventure, and an acute understanding of the fading line between actual and virtual life. “There’s a whole posse around Ryan of young artists who look up to him,” says former New Museum curator Rachel Greene. But she doesn’t think we’ll see many artists quite like him, and the art world seems to agree: Trecartin showed in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and seven of his works now sit in Charles Saatchi’s collection of up-and-comers.