Why 35?

I received an artist residency opportunity ... another opportunity for artists under 35.   It's not unusual to see emerging artists opportunities limited to artists under 35, or sometimes to artists with less than 5 years out of school (a 5 year clock one could restart by entering an MFA program).  Given the impact that external validation can have in developing an artists' reputation and collector base, precluding key opportunities for validation places older artists at a competitive disadvantage.

Why 35?  The cap may be an arbitrary and capricious limiting means, or...

Perhaps it's simply easier to excite people about a young person.  The age cap appeals to the prodigy model, judging that the early genius is more likely than the late bloomer to emerge into artistic greatness and that the late bloomer will slog it out on his/her own whether or not he/she is recognized early on without the art world losing out on him/her.  35, then is a generously late cut-off.

Presume a model in which greatness and breakthrough come earlier rather than later, with later years producing work derivative of the breakthrough work,  and the cap may try to capture the promise of the early years, and to time the exact period in which the art is both fresh and great.

The age cap may presume that older people have more other resources and need less guidance or institutional assistance and validation.   Art is not alone.  It's much harder to get into a MBA program after 35 or 40, and scholarly fellowship programs tend to have similar age caps.   This seems to be a function of judging that careers should begin earlier rather than later.

If you take a kid who finishes his BFA at 21 (USA), add a couple years for getting into an MFA program and then 2 years for finishing it - 25 - the now degree credentialed artist has 10 years in which to emerge via some key emerging artists opportunities, which are very limited in number.  If the artist started straight out of high school.  

Change the starting point -- come to art after other choices -- and that time would be clipped or erased.  Perhaps that is the point -- for art to always be the artist's first choice, a silly romantic notion about the great artists having no choice but to make art.   A cross-disciplinary art world that increasingly borrows from other fields, often weakly, should recognize that people, even artists, do have a choice in whether they make art.  Why not allow for time to gain knowledge through disciplined study of other fields like science?  Why not allow time for the accumulation of knowledge and experiential grounding?  Perhaps the age will rise if  the PhD studio model (gag, likely institutionalizing weak toe dipping into other fields) were to gain ground.

I would like to see the age cap go.  Plenty of artists start later in life and have been producing art work for the same amount of time as a younger person.  One cannot always put a timeline on when all the pieces will come together for a particular artist ... after 5 years of work, after 10, after 15 or 20.  If romantic notions about prodigies and youth are true rather than merely mythic or artifacts of skewing the system by excluding older artists from opportunities, inclusion of older artists in opportunities would not effect who emerges.