Arts and ages of life

This issue of Communications assumes that in order to understand the anthropological importance of arts, we must consider that humans create and interact with arts throughout their whole life, from infancy until old age. Yet to date, little attention has been paid to the evolution of creative practices and aesthetic experiences over the course of life, notably during childhood, adolescence, and old age.
The articles collected here cover the domains of visual and decorative arts, of literature and of theatre. The disciplinary approaches encompass sociology, art history, literary studies, theatrical analysis, philosophy, and comparative study of culture.
The issue is organized around three topics.
The first is the representation of life stages in artworks. Throughout history, arts have greatly contributed to the dissemination of specific models of life stages, at the same time asking questions about their meaning.
The second is the evolution of creative activities throughout life. The prevailing view in the West is that artists reach their peak of creativity in the years stretching from entering adulthood to the first manifestations of old age. This bias distorts our understanding of the diversity of artistic life paths.
The third topic is aesthetic experience. The study of its lifelong evolution has generally been neglected, except in terms of developmental psychology (for childhood) or attentional cognitive deficits (for old age). Hence, among others, a misunderstanding of the specificity of children’s aesthetic practices and specifically of the delicate balance between the spontaneity of curiosity and the social acculturation to which they bear witness. Due to social pressure, this balance is often lost in adulthood.