Event details

‘Ageing Badly’ challenges assumptions that the goal of one’s later years is to age well or ‘successfully’, a message that, since the 1960s, has become pervasive, naturalised in medicine, social theory, and popular culture. Ageing badly, by contrast, encompasses a range of uncomfortable and idiosyncratic ways in which art works, bodies, artists, and ideas, such as ‘the 1960s’, have aged over time. The language of ageing is deeply entangled with those concerning time, history, and the body—languages that have in turn shaped the field of art history and feminist interventions in the field. Focusing on art made in the 1960s, that in various ways confronts or instantiates an idea of ageing, this lecture proposes that the question of age is one that art history is uniquely placed to address.