Ryan Trecartin, Any Ever, MoMA PS1, New York

Critical adoration has swamped 30-year-old Ryan Trecartin from the start of his career, a meagre six years ago. He’s been touted as “the next Matthew Barney”, lionised as “the magus of the internet age” and hailed as a “Ritalin Rembrandt”. Museums hustled to exhibit him from the moment he was plucked from the Rhode Island School of Design. His antic swirl of cinema and sculpture reaped hysterical praise at the New Museum in Manhattan, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Liverpool Biennial. And now comes the biggest enchilada: MoMA PS1’s mammoth show of seven movies in seven galleries, each one decorated like a picnic space, a movie theatre or a conference room. The ambitions of these four frenetic hours are scaled to the expansive space. Trecartin takes on nothing less than “new forms of technology, language, narrative, identity, and humanity”. Is that all?

I find myself standing against both this cascade of hosannas and Trecartin’s high-pitched assault. His videos spit out a relentless hurly-burly of spasmodic soliloquies, quick-cut koans, brightly coloured computer animation and gnomic punchlines delivered in digital chipmunk voices, all adding up to a picture of life with no centre. These strobing images light up a stunningly superficial social critique and a strain of virulent narcissism. At the heart of Trecartin’s work lies a dark keening for attention that haunted me long after I left the museum. That desperation may, perversely, be his greatest strength.

Trecartin’s video-operas star himself and a series of would-be actors he discovered in Florida, where he shot most of Any Ever. Decked out in wigs and smeared with make-up, they address the camera and pontificate in rivulets of drivel. “Capitulation is sexy when you land on the right vibration”; “I am SO excited to be part of a cool hip fresh new experience”; “I’m gonna go wash off this picket fence and f*** up a tanning bed”.

At first these declarations seem like a fitful stream of corporate buzzwords, delivered in a Valley-girl whine. But every now and then they actually spell out what Trecartin is getting at: the idea that all of us consist of a stockpile of attitudes, and that we define ourselves by what we buy. “My mother accused me of being nothing but accumulation posed as free will,” one character grouses. “I specialise in identity tourism,” says another.

Trecartin has been likened to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, early John Waters and Jack Smith, but his closest high-art progenitor is Cindy Sherman, who also deployed fake hair and face paint to impersonate a medley of stereotypes. They’re both interested in the process of self-construction and tap into pop imagery for source material. But if Sherman explored the mutability of identity, Trecartin sees everyone as essentially the same: self-obsessed and self-promoting. The women in Sherman’s early film-stills were preoccupied by their roles in the narrative; they didn’t even notice the camera. Trecartin and his young stand-ins (he seems never to have crossed paths with anyone older than 30) look straight at you, their babblings interrupted only by a quick edit or abrupt change of scene.

All that screaming is a symptom. The illness is a bottomless need for attention. Trecartin posits a world where fame is the only currency and one must strike a pose or fade away. His actors preen like semi-celebs on reality television or pathetic YouTube poseurs, itching to brand themselves.

Pure rage greases the wheels of Trecartin’s twisted theme park. When they’re not saying totally ditzy stuff like “Am I overexisting? Or am I overexisting?” his screen alter egos destroy things. They hurl hammers at walls, smash wine glasses, set fire to swimming pools. One character douses another with lighter fluid. Another pummels a picture frame, shrieking the same phrase over and over: “Contemporary slut everybody’s got the AGENDA!” (These lines are apparently not improvised; Trecartin insists the work is carefully scripted.) Each player totters at the brink of a temper tantrum. The road to fame is paved with frustration.

Many of the videos end with an orgy of destruction: sets trashed and liquids spewed, props and people in tatters. That’s as close to sexy as things get in Trecartin-land, where seduction is just another power tool in the self-promotion kit. Just as all the conversation here boils down to monologue, the sex is solo, too, part of the vamping people do in front of their home computers.

Trecartin suffers from the same universalising fallacy that afflicts so much confessional writing: I feel this way, so the rest of the world must, too. As I lurched from one room to another of Any Ever, I kept arguing with his bleak view of a modern humanity locked into perpetual performance. Some of us still cherish privacy and flee the spotlight. Not all of us are always camera-ready, ever prepared for the eventuality of an interview the way some Soviet citizens kept a bag packed in case of arrest.

Yet poking around in the shallows of the cultural sandbox, Trecartin has discovered a nugget of barely buried truth. His world may not be everyone’s – it certainly is not mine – but it does count among its denizens New York congressman Anthony Weiner, whose downfall came from a tragic need to pose and tweet; Sarah Palin, who took a carefully choreographed family “vacation” in a campaign bus, trailed by a retinue of reporters; and Charlie Sheen, whose fevered rants Trecartin might almost have dreamed up himself. (I understand that Trecartin is analysing – nay, critiquing! – all this self-aggrandising insanity, but must the medium be as annoying as the message?)

Coming out of PS1, I found that, though I felt pummelled and horrified, the show had worked a weird magic on my perceptions. Suddenly, I started seeing people the way Trecartin does: as walking collections of irksome affectations. His gaudy alternate reality had temporarily tinted the real world, making it seem equally appalling. That’s a genuine achievement.

Until September 3, ps1.org