“Oh, grow up!” would be a reasonable response to “Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer,” an intermittently interesting but ultimately disappointing exhibition at the New Museum. Organized by Richard Flood, the museum’s chief curator, it introduces two artists in their 40s who not only share a fascination with male adolescence and classic rock but also seem mired in creative adolescence themselves.
The exhibition consists of two separate but conjoined shows, each occupying half of the museum’s second floor. In their respective displays of confusingly diverse works Mr. Shearer, who lives in Vancouver, and Mr. Guzmán, of Mexico City, resemble promising but unfocused grad students who have yet to assimilate their influences fully.
Mr. Shearer’s most convincing works are his small, finely drawn portraits of men and boys with long rocker-style hair. They are affecting, subtly comical meditations on archaic fantasies of archetypal masculinity purveyed by the heavy-metal music industry.