Everyone wants to stay relevant, which becomes more and more difficult. You get older and tired. Do you get wiser? Well, at least you get the feeling that you’ve seen it all before. I recall my grandmother saying “World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars! I believed it, everyone did! And off they marched! But wars will never stop. We’ll always find excuses to kill each other.” That seemed wise when I was 10, and time proved her right.
The young are always relevant though this doesn’t stop them from torturous self-questioning. As people get older the question becomes more pronounced. I recall the day when my mother said she’d been called ma’am for the first time; it marked a shift for her but I didn’t understand the symbolism. She wasn’t a woman for me, she was my mom. Later I heard from many older women that they all experienced the same thing, what they called “invisibility” after a certain point in their lives. How do you fight it? The 17th-century French writer La Bruyère wrote about elderly women who, still playing the coquette, wore red ribbons in their hair to the Royal Court. And though Dylan Thomas wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night,” I wonder what he’d think about some modern ways to escape it, like Botox injections or cosmetic surgery resulting in faces stretched in 10 directions at once? It’s not just ladies: now that I’m getting older algorithms send me suggestions to fight the aging process like developing a set of “six-pack” abdominal muscles, hair implants and pharmaceutical wonders. But my mind has changed, I can’t be who I was, even if I did have a “six-pack.”
Relevancy plays a role in all forms of art, music, film, and painting. Actors need to stay relevant, for public taste changes with succeeding generations. Many start out as a sex symbol and with the passing of time, have to retransition into another type of image. Some do this for a long time, like Elisabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando or Shirley MacLaine. Sharon Stone didn’t quite do it, despite her beauty. Look how hard Tom Cruise is working to show that he’s still filled with the vital essence. Maybe it’s better either to die and become Immortal like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, or simply to take character roles. Elisha Cook, Jr., a famous character actor (pictured above in a still with Bogart from The Maltese Falcon) was active for over 60 years.
Some become strangers to the changing world. I was surprised when I read in Isadora Duncan’s autobiography that she found jazz—she was speaking around 1910—to be undanceable. Instead of enjoying the repetitive, syncopated rhythms seductive, she found them inexpressive in comparison to Chopin and other composers. Quincy Jones said it was hard for him, after working with Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and others, to get excited about rap. Hector Berlioz, when Richard Wagner presented him with the score to “Tristan and Isolde,” said it made no sense to him. Most rock bands have an active life of 10 years, after that, it’s a nostalgia trip. They’re not relevant, but simply familiar.
Staying relevant, for some means staying in the past. For example, people still romanticize Beat Poetry or the Warhol Factory scene, both dating from over 60 years ago. Both, for better or worse, were very relevant when they began. Are they still or have they become poses?
Art, as a transcendental and transformative social phenomenon, is currently dead. Art, in its true form, is the expression of the human soul and the belief that life means something. In a society that doesn’t hold these beliefs, how can it exist? Today it’s science and politics that people get worked up about. In any social setting, just say “Trump” and watch the sparks fly. I did it the other night at an art opening: the reaction I got was so passionate it made any discussion about the work hanging on the wall inconsequential.