Installation view: Walker Art Center, Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/MxMillian: 2006

Not that credentials should drive your decision as to which artists to track, but as fate would have it Adam Helms has all the blue chips stacked in his favor. Product of Yale's MFA program, carried by Sister in LA and Mariane Boesky in NY and collected by museum power-brokers like John Friedman, Helms art has all the cachet a rising star might need. Past all those superficial values, his work plays with the subversive fringes of American culture wgile rendering them with a kind of finely etched romanticism. Even if it were a litho, I'd buy into it.