Culture Shock: Never mind the cult of youth – let’s hear it for the auld ones

One of the things I remember most clearly through the aftermath of Leaving Certificate results and CAO offers was the sense of hurry. Embodied in the notion of the points race is the idea of a contest in which you are pitted against your peers but also running against time. Our society is so structured that the moment you leave school your best years are a finite commodity – and the end is already in sight.

Newspapers are not immune. “20 20-somethings” articles nudge out “30 under 30” for freshness. But what about “70 under 70”? How much does the quite reasonable celebration of youth influence what we value, and how much does it skew our understanding and celebration of creativity?

Young artist, young theatremaker, new writing prodigy, enfant-terrible designer: all these terms invoke youth as a positive in our creative value systems, while the designation “midcareer artist” does the opposite. “Mid” anything, in fact, becomes a pejorative: middle aged, middle class, middle of the road.

But is there an age when creativity declines? Are you washed up at 40? Doomed to average ordinariness in all things once you cross that watershed? And do different careers peak at different ages?

It is said that mathematicians make their greatest breakthroughs in their 20s while architects come into their own only in their 60s. Albert Einstein commented that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so”.

But before that makes all thirtysomething scientists too gloomy consider a study of Nobel science laureates that shows that the age at which breakthrough work is made is rising. From 1965 to 2000 fewer than 20 percent of the winners had completed their signature work before they hit 40. One of the study's authors, Benjamin Jones of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, in Illinois, puts this down to the fact that there is now more discovered knowledge available to take on board about the world. Consequently, you need longer to absorb all the information that will enable you to make the next leap.

This can be described as the difference between “fluid” and “crystallised” intelligence. The former is the ability to solve new problems; the latter is the ability to bring knowledge and experience to bear on solving a set of problems. That doesn’t mean the cult of the young innovator is a myth, but perhaps we take greater note of the achievements of geniuses such as the Limerick-born Collison brothers, creators of the online-payments system Stripe and millionaires while still in their teens, because their story is so seductive.

In fact our brains do change. Numeric ability peaks around the age of 25, but inductive reasoning – the ability to parse what we have learned about the world – isn’t at its height until we are in our 50s. The same is true for empathy, and we don’t reach full vocabulary capacity until our late 60s.

This means that as artists and writers get older their work, for want of a better word, matures – and with that we’re back to the problem of how we view people at different life stages. Mature used to mean improve, but now it carries a more toxic whiff of decline.

The work of young artists can seem more exciting because it is, when it is good, actually brand new. We don’t have their previous work to measure it against, and we can also pat ourselves on the back for discovering, or buying into the discovery of, a new voice. Nevertheless, caught between celebrating the extremes of youth and venerable old age, a generation gets missed, and misses out.

Before the recession the system of supports for emerging voices across the arts was designed, albeit imperfectly, to kick-start careers and help propel artists, writers and performers to a point at which they could, just about, support themselves. The recession destroyed that.

To take visual arts as an example, public, corporate and private collectors stopped buying. So midcareer artists now need as much support as those who are emerging, but the structures, with exceptions such as the RHA’s Ortho Award, aren’t there.

Those support systems go beyond grants and prizes. There is, for example, a tacit understanding that artists selected to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale will not necessarily be at the absolute peak of their careers but will the ones most likely to benefit from their selection.

That way of looking at things may result in some strong choices, but it is less likely to favour artists over the age of 50. The implication is that they have already done their networking and are out there in the world. Still, shouldn't an artist of the calibre of Alice Maher be up for selection? It would be interesting to see what the choices might look like if there were a way to enable age blindness alongside gender blindness in some selection panels.

Some stories are best told with the raw bravery of the new. Others require a lifetime of experience to distil. We need to reremember to value both.