or late bloomers vs. early bloomers:
The New Yorker has an interesting article by Malcomb Gladwell: "Late Bloomers, why do we equate genius with precocity?"
It's an interesting question, made (I believe) all the more relevant by our society's worship of youth culture, even as we deride it.
"Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table."
Maybe youth is deemed more exciting because the young are {generally considered} prettier?
7 comments:
I have been young, and now I'm not, so there are different views, depending upon which side of the line you are seeing from.
Youth has strength, but more often than not, it is used to break things.
Youth has fire, but often the wrong things get consumed by it.
Youth has beauty, but the problem is that they obsess over it.
Youth has freshness, but they don't close the wrapper and it becomes stale.
Youth has speed, but they don't know that sometimes when you rush, you miss the details.
Youth has time, but they place little value upon it.
Youth has the future and it's infinite possibilities.
On the other hand, there is Age
Age has experience which we paid for with our youth.
Age has knowledge, which we spent our youth acquiring.
Age has wisdom, if we paid attention and learned....
Age has skills, which took all our years to master.
Age has patience, which without, everything is the enemy.
Age has perspective, because we have traveled farther, and can see the long view.
And last, but not least, Age has
"youth" also, the little bastards are our kids.....
some observations by Chris
I think it has to do with unexpectedness, of speed, and glamour...I don't think there is any "correct" path, it is just interesting to me to think about how "art stars" are made, and how, in our culture of youth, they then become celebrities...
that same way we (the grand we) react when a child of three can play Mozart like a pro...it goes back to ideas of genius, and (for me) of Jungian archetypes...
Well, you either "got it" or you don't.
It may be in some cases the young accomplish feats of wonder because they aint old enough to know they can't...
I mean, hell, they look more like me than me! It's like fashion. It's all got to do with video and shit. Once you start to get the eyes involved with music, music will take the backseat, and that's what the video thing is. Why can't video find its own niche in life and get off music's back? This is not going to endear me to VH-1 or MTV, but they know how I feel about it. It's a conflict of the senses. You're gonna judge a record by a TV screen and some images with some shitty little sound coming out of those boxy little speakers? I mean, how many people really have them hooked up to stereos? The way they deliver a record is with some semi-nude chicks, which I have no problem with, but not to sell my music. The music becomes like elevator background music, relegated. And of course, then you've encouraged people to become posers and not composers. Andy Warhol's little dream's come true: Everybody's a star for 15 minutes.
"it is just interesting to me to think about how "art stars" are made, and how, in our culture of youth, they then become celebrities..."
It's all about the money, honey, and marketability. You cannot de-link
the commercial pop market from the buck. So, you have your splash, the cash, and mostly trash.
It's also the factor of the lowest common denominator, if that many fall for the hype and promotion, then it must be....
But most of the attention these types get is fleeting,and only lasts until the new flavor of the moment gets pushed into the public consciousness, here today, gone tomorrow. It is all fuel for the machine, which will grind them up and spit them out just as fast as the next "Art Star" can be "discovered"
These poseurs who drape islands in crepe, or dump 30,000 pounds of bananas in public squares are in my opinion, attention seeking wankers masquerading under the alias of "artist"
I am an Artist, therefore, anything and everything that results from my magic touch, must be, because it flows from the amazing spring of my talent, art.
Ok, but who is going to clean up all this mess?
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