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It is the career of a Dutch artist: you go to art school, maybe graduate school, live on a starter’s grant, work here and there as an artist in residence, get into a group show, then a few more group shows, have some one-man shows at a gallery, teach at an art school, and suddenly, there you are, mid-career. It creeps up like an assassin.They say that life begins at 40, but in art, this is a phase that is more like the end than a beginning. Nothing is more depressing than a retrospective of a mid-career artist. The unbridled joy of endless creativity is over. We get to see the identity of the artist. The very first drawings of ‘an oeuvre’ are presented. What was still an experiment in an exhibition in the past – an adventure, a wild investigation full of youth and promise – is now held up to the test of its inherent consistency.Mid-career exhibitions are shows that do not set out to present something new, but to put things into perspective, and every schoolboy knows what that means: the stuff they later test you on. From amusement, from impetuous freewheeling, from the art of the devil-may-care, and after me, the Deluge, the work of an artist suddenly has to mean something. One has to have a standpoint, insight, maturity, depth.For the art world of the last decade, the word mid-career had something of a bad smell to it. In the 1990s, when the urge to innovate knew no bounds as it rode the wave of an exploding economy, no one at all expressed interest in the marginal annotations of the younger artist growing older. An over-40 artist not prepared to pave perpetually new roads was avoided like the plague, simply passed over, completely ignored. A whole generation of artists almost fell entirely out of view. Hordes of artists had to fear for the very future of their artistic existence. Those who had made a name for themselves in the 1980s and early 1990s especially ran the risk of being forgotten, forever.But there is hope. There is growing interest in mid-career artists. For a few years now, De Paviljoens Museum in Almere has focused its exhibition programme almost entirely on mid-career retrospectives of artists in their 40s, including Job Koelewijn and Barbara Visser. Since it reopened a year ago, the Schiedam Museum has felt itself called on to select mid-career artists for its solo exhibitions, and has duly shown Maria Roosen and Otto Egberts. De Hallen in Haarlem is currently showing The present order is the disorder of the future, with ‘hip’ art from London and Berlin galleries by Slater Bradley, Milena Dragicevic, Manuel Graf, Stefan Rinck and Marijn van Kreij. Shows are being presented as exhibitions of a ‘new’ generation of artists, but the artists setting the tone are those in their 40s, with art that is conspicuous for its traditional visual language and media, its diffidence in tone and subdued, almost introverted style of reasoning. What does this attention to mid-careers mean for artists who live in a world that not so long ago wanted only to hear about the ‘new’ and ‘young’, and was declaring one revolution after another? Are depth and continuity winning out over the urge to innovate? Two writers investigate what it means when art that stands for maturity, depth and tradition is stealing all the attention. Is the art world tired of all the trendy hype, all the screeching and histrionics about renewal? Is it in search of more substance, more content and inspiration? And as such an interest that works against the economics of the art market? Or does the current popularity of ‘older’ art just show how much the art world is preoccupied with commercializing everything even further? At galleries and art fairs, traditional art forms, such as drawing and painting, do indeed sell better than truly innovative art. -Domeniek Ruyters