I think certain art forms and styles suit a younger person. Anything involving extreme flamboyance, aggression, exuberance . There's a type and level of energy and passion that comes out of youth that has been embodied by the art forms of the mid 20th century until now. The art of youth has been raised up as something so great as to encompass ALL permissible art. Meanwhile the type of art a person over 30 might make is Lame-o-daddio . Square!Forge. wrote:did you see that fairly recent "lawyer's cut" Monty Python doco? A couple of them were making the slightly depressing comment about how as you get older things get more predictable and you also laugh less because you've heard all the jokes before...Angstrom wrote:I'm pretty sure that a person in their 40s is better at anticipating their future behaviour than a person in their teens, or 20s.
I've seen a lot of scenes come and go, so I'm pretty fine when a scene starts to wane. However some of my younger friends flap like drowning men as their first love starts to go under. It's interesting to see, and hard to tell them " dude, let it go" .
I definitely agree it's more of a younger thing to be bad at predicting things... I guess you get more existential as you get older because you see the triviality in a lot of things and reshape your plans from wild and ambitious to mild and realistic.
I am frequently amazed to realise how many of the big musicians I used to listen to were in their 20s when they did some of their best work. I feel like I was just a kid without a clue in my 20s.. the beatles were mostly 30 or under by the time they split.
Ian Curtis was dead at 23!!
So, in the absence of a clue, or artistic guts, we see pensioners singing teenage rebellion songs for the dollars ("hope I die before I get old") rather than be artistically true to themselves and their true age, and write something relevant, or just quit it if they can't write true.
But a lot of that Ian Curtis 1st world problems moaning / or Jimi Hendrix space spunking stuff is really only good if you are the same age and discovering those passionate feelings for the first time. Wow, this song about a sexy space elf is really in tune with my-first-bong-rip. Because at 18 our dopamine receptors are really succeptible to strong passions at that age, but they will latch onto pretty much anything with a scanty shred of personal relevance or "meaning" and declaim it's unique brilliance.
That doesn't mean that the more complex feelings which you discover later in life are less good, or less interesting to evoke through art. The myriad complex thoughts available when you can gain perspective are MORE interesting, and MORE varied than " I'm a lonely pale white boy" and " I'm a sex machine" and " I want to dance now".
But most people are blind to the wider possibilities, because popular media is predicated on the spending power of the 18-30 demographic. TV, Films, magazines, adverts. Youth culture is IT. You've got to be now!
Look outside of the last 50 years of commercial western popular culture (youth culture) - humans have been expressing themselves well for thousands of years and there's no age restrictions. Here a wide range of modes of expression, and art.
Don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree
