Do people reach a creative peak and is it related to age?

STOP STARTING THREADS YOU BALDING CUNT! BALD GUYS AREN'T ALLOWED ON HIPSTER MESSAGEBOARDS FUCK OFF YOU BALD CUNT

Does it depend to an extent on the art form in question? In pop music its all about freshness of approach, and because of the way pop culture works in general youth is favoured - people get in there early, put out a few fantastic records and by the time they hit 30-odd people are already bored.

As far as I can see you can't apply this approach to, say, literature. How many novelists can you seriously argue produced their best work before the age of 30 (or even 40)?

Why does it take longer with literature, life experience?

Lots - maybe even most - of the canonical novels were written by people under 40.

I think it's only partly to do with age. It seems to have more to do with how much an artist has already produced and diminishing returns. Because most artists begin serious work at a similar age (in their twenties, roughly*) their peaks (approx 5 years after their first public work) and declines (10 years) also often coincide, but it's not the actual ages that matter.

But as Matt DC points out, the typical ages vary according to medium.

God I can barely stand how astounding balding guys are

I think there's an arc to most artists' work, after a while they either start to repeat themselves or there's a slide in quality. (There are many exceptions of course - Beethoven's late quartets for example.) I think it's to do with reaching an optimum moment of experience and openness to change, new ideas, and the world in general. Too young, and you're open to new ideas but have no experience. Too old, you have the experience but you're not open to new ideas. The arc is different in different disciplines, because the balance between experience and creativity is different in different disciplines.

I was kind of thinking 20th Century here... my comment may still be bullshit though.

there are some good posts in this thread too:

creativity with age

i second 'random abuser'

A decline isn't always to do with age...some artists get sucked into churning out constant profitable 'product' and don't take the necessary time out to regenerate ideas and refresh themselves.

Another thing is that as you get older there are less chances for some new experience to come along and inspirer some good creative juices to start bubbling; especially if many of the new experiences have already happened throughout one's younger life.

The answer is Yes, and it's 31.

That's why Lodger is David Bowie's best album then!

I'm planning a peak, at about 53.

This is a re'lly good quest'n. I think basically Eyeball Kicks is OTM.
I'm a firm believer that anybody with a modicum of talent and/or individuality/originality that is artistically inclined in a given avenue of expression, contains something intrinsic worth of contributing to the world, whether it be good or bad. However, it only inhabits a certain scope of range that is exhausted all too easily for most, within which complacency is found or freshness consumed. Thus, for whatever given reason(s), once the essence of that creative output is depleted, we are left with the scraps of formulaic redundancy. So once you get started, you better put yr mojo to good use, before it runs out.

"So once you get started, you better put yr mojo to good use, before it runs out."

Howlin Wolf never started recording until he was 41 years old. His career probably peaked around 1960, when he was 50.

Well, exactly. Your artistic lifespan takes only so long. I came up with an elaborate chaos theory quite some time ago, in which I averaged this number of years we're alluding to here (at least, when talking of recording artists), and came to the conclusion that no rock or blues musician can create consistently great material for a period longer than 12 yrs.; fifteen at the very most. This does not apply to jazz though, as it's less restricting an artform. You heard it here first. COPYRITE, BAY-BEH

I think the "conventional wisdom" (to use a vile phrase) about why novelists mature later than people of other forms is that unlike something like poetry or pop music the novel at its best ought to have a kind of universality to it-- that is, an overarching understanding of more than one character, even if those characters aren't treated sympathetically. When you're young, all you have is yourself and your own experience to draw upon, and worse yet have probably allowed your intelligence and insecurity and arrogenacer to dupe you into thinking you understand other peoplefar better than you actually do. This is why so many first novels are bildungsroman types, obviously. Only with age and experience and lots more reading do you get the kind of wisdom and perspective (not to mention the time needed for craft and style) to write a fair and true and complete novel.
Now, since pop music is unapologetically about the speaker (pretty much always-- occasionally maybe not with bands like Belle and Seb or something) and since cliche is tolerated and purity of emotion and expression is valued so much more highly than originality, you can write a great pop song when you're really young. In fact, the kind of plurality of understanding that makes a good novelist miight even make a bad pop musician--the perspectives get jumbled in such a controlled form.
Poetry is a tricky one, because it requires the intensity of emotion that comes with adolescence coupled with a certain maturity of voice. I feel like a bit of a fogey saying this, but I feel like these days we couldn't produce a poet like Rimbaud or Keats, who reached their artistic peaks (we assume-- barring death or craziness) in their early twenties, because of our education system now. It goes without saying that before an artist is going to do much of anything, he has to study his chosen art for a pretty long time. Someone like Keats would have gotten that at school from his pre-adolescence, but these days, you don't touch that stuff until college, if you're lucky. By the time you've absorbed enough of it to write, you're old enough that your perspective has changed and you're writing about different stuff-- or about the same stuff, with different motives.
But all this is by way of saying I think certain art forms have their peaks at certain ages, because those ages afford the perpectives best suited to those art forms, but there's no general expiry date on talent. Probably with a lot of people money or vanity corrupts them once they attain success, or they become bored with the things they're best at and move toward highly personal experimentation to maintain their interest in their own work, or they become either suffocatingly critical or fatally confident of their work. But I think the best of them just keep getting better, if they can avoid the traps of mortal fear or sentimentality or senility. Like Yeats, for example. And, uh, pretty much nobody else.

12 years? shit i better get cracking

"And, uh, pretty much nobody else."

naw, It seems like there's many others too.

If you never do anything yr unlikely to peak and so get depressed about it, which I think is a kickass plan