As Russell wrote, the work’s magnificent ambition is plain. Bartlett turned out to be charting a path out of the austere minimalist abstraction — all math, graph paper, rulers and protractors — that dominated ’60s and ’70s art. Rhapsody in particular provided a map for the loose, brash painting of the coming decade — pastiches of quoted images and styles, the return of representational imagery and a free hand, mixing abstraction with representation. (It’s also a reflection of Bartlett’s catholic tastes: “I don’t have a signature look and that’s disturbing to people.”) But confronting her early paintings three decades later, I don’t feel the excitement. Rhapsody seems an ambitious but dry academic essay. Maybe you had to be there.

ANGELA STRASSHEIM: Like something out of the dark American dreams of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock by way of Gregory Crewdson and David Lynch.

The young photographers in “reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow” at the Art Institute of Boston could learn from Bartlett’s go-for-broke daring. This is the second half of a show organized by the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne. Organizers rounded up work by 50 recent graduates of top art schools from around the world to predict who will be photo stars two decades hence.

Among the more promising are Angela Strassheim, Ryo Ohwada, and Marla Rutherford, a Boston University alum. Strassheim, whose work was included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, presents a formal photo of a blonde girl in a diaper sudsing the hair of a woman laying in a tub. You need to see a group of her crystalline photos of Midwestern life to feel it, but her work is powered by an oneiric strangeness, like something out of the dark American dreams of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock by way of Gregory Crewdson and David Lynch.

Ohwada is a future fabulist, creating mesmerizing kaleidoscopic landscapes through photo and Photoshop tricks. Here he offers a fabulous green garden cave floating in a pond of lily pads. The main structure seems to come from the same image reflected four times, so that it becomes a kaleidoscopic Rorschach test scene. But the more you see of his work, the more it feels merely gimmicky.

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Rutherford is another future fabulist, but with hints of Japanese pop artist Mariko Mori. Here a woman in a see-through plastic dress and white platform shoes stands in the middle of a nowhere desert world. It seems like something out of “Barbarella,” or an advertisement for futuristic homemaker bondage cleaning kits.

Most of the work here is formally polished but terribly well behaved. And it’s all curiously similar in tone and style regardless of whether the artists hail from Poland or China or Yale University. Almost everybody works in the deadpan style that sees head-on posed photos of people with blank expressions as somehow revelatory. Everything — feeling in particular — is kept at arm’s length.

The organizers suggest that the artists are reacting to our nervous, precarious historical moment. It’s clear that deadpan is a dominant American (a/k/a New York) photo style, but is it really the universal style of this era, or is this show just a reflection of the curators’ tastes? Let’s hope there’s more variety out there in the hinterlands; otherwise we’re in for a uniformly dour future.

“Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work” | Addison Gallery of American Art | Phillips Academy, 180 Main St, Andover | Though December 10

“ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow” | Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University | 700 Beacon St, Boston | Through November 5