ABSTRACT
While aging artists must contend with all the same physical, psychological, social, and cultural forces as do the rest of us, they at once face more fraught challenges and yet have at their disposal a potentially enabling means of dealing with them positively: their unique creative agency. For those working in all art forms, their later years are marked by expectations (their own and others’) of continuing creativity—indeed, of career summation and aesthetic culmination—which can lead to a later-life crisis in light of their own impending mortality and society’s anticipated “decline narrative” (Gullette). What the critics will deem their “late style” will end up being an evaluative as well as descriptive designation. As creative agents, artists therefore often attempt in their later years to control, through self-fashioning, not only the meaningful coherence of their personal life narrative but also their artistic reputation, past and future. Agency and legacy intersect, as both come under pressure. Creativity is both a gift and a curse.
