Peter Plagens on Art and Age

As you get older, in the art world as elsewhere, you"re confronted with some choices about how to conduct yourself. You can, for instance, stay locked in the style you strutted when you were younger and hipperthat is, continuing to wear a ponytail and tight cowboy shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons long after you"ve gone bald on top and acquired a gut. Or you can try to keep up with today"s younger people by copying their fashions: Shave your head, wear small, expensive blue Italian sunglasses and a shiny suit over a black T-shirt and try to blend in with the 30something critics and curators. Or you can just give up altogether on trying to wax contemporaryand wear bow ties, tweed jackets with elbow patches, and take your proud place as a naysayer who thinks that this time the art world really has gone to hell in a hand basket.

I find myself thinking about this stuff lately because I"m now almost 70 an age I seem to have reached suddenly, and quite unjustly, overnight.

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