Some time ago a weekly magazine “Przekrój” featured an article on the current situation of some Hollywood stars popular at the end of the 1980s, the beginning of the 1990s. How has their situation changed with time? Has their age influenced their artistic work in any way? Are they still admired? Does a superannuated beauty, so far associated mainly with erotic entourage, stand a chance to survive in the film business? Will old associations, not quite true today, allow the audience to see other strong points of the star? Let’s ask openly: are youth, beauty, and health glorified by art? And if so, who are the main victims of such attitude? Artists? Audiences? Or maybe both a bit?  

Everybody knows it’s the elderly people who made youth and beauty their mark and the main bargaining card that find it most difficult to get jobs. The example of film heart-throbs and heroines illustrates this problem most clearly: we all remember how hard John Travolta had to work to get rid of the image of a dancing dish from “Saturday Night Fever”. The biggest problem of Hollywood stars: how not to give in to the flow of time and to show that apart from looking good they are also talented. America is the best place to study such phenomena because the American style of life is focused on such notions as “youth”, “beauty”, “health”, “vitality”.

Pop culture dominated by this American way of thinking is extremely sensitive to the flow of time. And the market makes this tendency even stronger. Show business feeds on the continuous flow of fashions which make the money machine going: flow of fashions = flow of cash. What should be done to increase the turnover? Stylistic differences should be exaggerated, and the flow of time should be accelerated. Fashions should change as quickly as possible – what was in yesterday, is going out of fashion today. Yesterday’s star is replaced by a novice, yesterday’s hit becomes a classic and gives way to new trends (even if those trends consist only in recycling past things creatively). To put it simply - this is how this machinery works: novelty chases novelty, everything lives an ephemeral life and – if is good enough – becomes evergreen in double-quick time. In order to survive in this world, you have to be Madonna, a pop-culture chameleon, in other words. 

Does this rule apply to the so-called highbrow art as well? Nowadays the line between pop culture and art becomes more and more blurred. Sometimes the benefits of this blurring are mutual: ‘mass entertainment’ gets wiser, art acquires new audiences (although it may happen the other way round: art turns stupid and pop culture gets lost in the maze of formalistic theories and loses audience). Art has become dependent on the rhythm of fashions, even if it aspires to being a critical comment on the pop culture world. Artists have to be ‘in the swim’, or they are out of the game and cease to be important on the art market. The ability to comment on the current situation (political or social) is certainly valuable, however this pursuit of the present has recently become pathological. The race is on, although nobody knows why or what is at stake.  

And what about renowned artists? Do we know any veteran artists, people with recognized artistic achievements? How are they treated? Are they also made to enter this crazy pursuit of today? It seems that they are, that everybody has to respect the rhythm of the market reflected in the kaleidoscope of continuous and sudden (convulsive even) stylistic about-turns. If you are out of the mainstream, you are doomed to failure. No space is free from fashions, there is no avant-garde or classics. You can afford artistic freedom only when you can afford being in artistic oblivion – otherwise you are dependent on the current trend. Who, except for a few enthusiasts, is interested in the works of artists who had until recently been masters, if those works are not in conformity with the current styles, if they are not talked about? But maybe this is where the real art is going on – in the space not dominated by the obsession of being up-to-date? Perhaps we should listen to those ‘passe’, ‘too old’ and ‘unhealthy’, who can afford market oblivion? Artists whose achievements have been recognized, who don’t have to prove anything to anybody, who can afford such not commercially viable experiments. It’s worth listening to their voice, although getting indifferent to transient fashions is only a starting point and does not guarantee the significance of a work of art.  However, such assumptions must be inspiring as they become the embers of activities which turn the audience off this unbearable “Here and Now”, and direct it towards everything that we are trying to put on the sidelines (old age, death, disease,  transience), and that is crucial for our condition.