People say you’re as young as the person you feel. And many artists, particularly those who’ve enjoyed commercial success, often find themselves feeling younger the older they get. This week Artshub acknowledges great entertainers who felt they really hit their stride at a time when their contemporaries were scouring brochures for the old folk’s home.
Not long before he succumbed to throat cancer, legendary entertainment icon Sammy Davis Junior told TV talk-show host Larry King, “[I have] never sung better in my life than I have in the last three and a half – four years.” Davis was 65.
He had survived military service, drug and alcohol addictions, several marriages, and a near fatal car accident. What Davis found was that having fully experienced the rich tapestry of life, what hadn’t killed him had made him an even better performer.
That is not to say that getting ageing is the key to becoming a creative genius. Another Davis, this time legendary trumpet player and composer Miles Davis, http://www.milesdavis.com/bio.htm once said: “Creativity and genius don’t know nothing about age; either you got it or you don’t, and being old is not going to help you get it.”
When we look at the careers of great artists we inevitably find they improve with age. Seeing as Picasso contrived masterpieces in his nineties and Louie Armstrong stormed the charts late in life, should we expect every hot young thing to be breaking the mercury as they hit old age?
Certainly, if they were great to begin with, says, who believes the vigour of the artistic journey can only get stronger with age. But if they were playing at it, if they were buoyed up by marketing and hype, then old age will find them out. Don’t expect any boy band members to suddenly become the next Mozart as they enter their fifties.
The advantage of being old for some is that the constraints of youth – wanting to be popular, for the work to sell, to be ‘on the edge’ – cease to apply. In a 2002 interview, when asked whether the cultural bias towards favouring youth had any effect on her, the woman dubbed ‘the oldest living surrealist, Dorothea Tanning, said: “Even old people want to be teenagers. But if my memory serves me well it wasn’t all that glorious. To my surprise, I have come to like being old. You can do what you want.”
Before his death in 2003, renowned cultural critic Edward Said became interested in artists whose ‘late’ works continued to probe and question, and which, in the example of Beethoven, “abandons communication with the social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”
It is understood that Said, once described as “one of the most influential scholars in the world” who campaigned for peace in the Middle East, took some comfort in knowing that in old age, an artist ‘has the power exactly to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.’
When a magnificent artist is free to do as they please, then, young or old, look out.
