While reading the morning paper, I noted that the local seniors activity hall was welcoming members now 40 and up. It appeared as if while 30 was the new 20 somehow within just a decade 40 weathered into the new senior. No gratis bus pass or early retirement specials but nonetheless in the view of this hall at least graduating into a sort of novice eldership.

While it was hard to imagine some of my skateboarding, video game playing, facebook addicted 40+ peer group being satisfied with the bridge and table tennis on offer, it certainly gave pause to readdress the conundrum of the middle years. It was also a rather bemusing affront to the botox injecting, teeth whiting aspirations of my forever young generation.

While age was a state of mind in many regards, and lord knows I've often felt older than many of my peers, I wasn't ready to sign up just yet, after all I'm almost but still not quite old enough (and it's nice to be too young for some things). It made me wonder what 40 year olds would welcome the seniors membership card in their wallets.

One of the most co-creative, capitalist savy painter of the modern age, Mark Kostabi launches a new game show where art critics and celebraties title his paintings for cash awards.
http://titlethis.com

Why do I love this and what Kostabi in his lustrous career of factory art has achieved. In the face of art crowd pretension and judgment of the unlimited "beholders" all that is sacred gets priced and sold in multitude. In the wake of Warhol, Kostabi's shameless reverence and affront to contemporary views of artist originality, he gleefully begets the question, as any modern artist worth their salt should, is this art. First paying people to paint like him, generate Kostabi ideas and add to his name on an hourly wage, he has now turned titling his paintings into a cash rewards game show. Kostabi rubs nose and dollar bills in the art world and manages to do it famously, artistically and lucratively.