Is generational affinity good for the artist?
Is it good for creative work to have some sense of an affinity towards one’s generation?
The disparate cohort and a sense of connection to various creatives from various times.
The milestone occurrences and crossovers of concentric aspects of life, these might be valid as commonalities.
A sense of grouping together of periods, works, and individuals as from a time and a context.
The process here is based on language and definitions and phrasings. It is based on a notion of fill-in-the-blank and falls within the qualitative realm. In any realm, thorough evaluation of a claim ought to question the leaps that are made where the connections aren’t justified.
How is it possible that people from an arbitrarily defined time, for that reason alone, have something in common?
Groupings of art periods and products can act as good venues for learning. Categorization and classification are great human inventions for communicating and thinking. We have an interesting paradoxical connection to categorization. We need it. But it isn’t always absolute fact. It tends to be interpretive.
Sometimes the notion of a category can be a positive membership for the creative individual. But it can also be something the individual counters as a way to redefine what they’re doing.
Can we derive a cohort commonality for creative work? Yes. What about a typology: too many moving parts for merely being born within the same time frame. But with other crossovers: time, location, specific location, social world, creative practice. Maybe then we can say something about a cohort.
What can my knowledge from being from a particular time and place do? A lot. But there can be a limit in understanding arbitrary cut-offs as absolute in their defining how creativity works.