01-12-2020, 06:33 PM
(05-13-2016, 10:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...The old art is better than the new art -- to no small extent because the bad art of times long past has long disappeared from sight. How much Renaissance art went into the bonfires of the vanities? Probably few bona fide masterpieces. Recent oily canvases that people cared little to preserve went up in smoke. Mediocre canvases -- like student works -- typically got painted over because canvas wasn't cheap.
Neoclassical painting is likely spent as a means of lively expression. Going beyond the achievements of classical artists is practically impossible. Most genuine achievements in performance, creativity, and academic achievement require about 10K hours (Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers) of preparatory work in childhood and adolescence before one achieves mastery enough to assure that one can churn out masterpieces easily. Beyond 10K one may have questions of possibility. Starting later gets one quickly to a brick wall (people quit developing intellectual power around age 20, so there is no "growing into" some achievement after age 25).
I don't think this is necessarily true. Van Gogh didn't begin painting at all until he was 27, and Cezanne was a nobody in his twenties. And fiction writing is far from a young person's game. The prefrontal cortex isn't even fully developed on average until age 25. Not all geniuses are/were necessarily child prodigies. Malcolm Gladwell to whom you attribute the 10K hour rule has also written extensively on late bloomers and has even said himself genius shouldn't necessarily be linked to precocity, even if they do often coexist. And needless to say, there are plenty of people who go back to school later in life and perform better academically than they did as an adolescent. So as for all intellectual development stalling at 20, extensive neuroscience research suggests otherwise. And besides, age 20 is simply an average. Just as some men are 5'5 others happen to be 6'5. Why should neurodevelopment be any different.
