All good questions and a thoughtful response. I don't think that my assessment is because of age. Most artists, and artistic movements, have peak periods of vitality, where new ideas, tools, and techniques fly at a ferocious pace. Few are able to maintain the pace or the freshness for more than a few years. In music, from my generation, the Stones, Dylan, Springsteen -even the Beatles if you look at their solo careers- peaked decades ago. Sure they still do something interesting occasionally but they will never produce another Highway 61 Revisited or Exile on Main Street.

I am of course overstating the rock is dead piece. There are great musicians making music everywhere, breathing new life into the form. Radiohead, I think, is a good example of that.

But you won't see any of the really exciting new ideas on Hall of Fame concerts. Those are all about money and nostalgia. My daughter and her friends, in their twenties, don't give a rat's ass for any of it.

BTW, a good example of an art form that I think is really done is the blues. The blues developed in the delta and in the postwar urban migration to the big cities- a very specific context. Those great artists are mostly all gone now- never to be replaced- and the lukewarm crap that passes for 'blues' these days will never hold a candle to the likes of Howlin Wolf and Muddy waters.