The Art of Aging and the Anxiety of Staying the Same: From Cindy Sherman

One blue eye wide open, the other closed. Her mouth twisted into a grimace created in post-production, her teeth painted white against a gradient carmine-red background, almost clown-like. Half the face in color, half in black and white. It is *Untitled #632*, one of the images with which Cindy Sherman—who turned seventy-two in January—once again tackles the theme that our image-obsessed society continues to treat as a taboo: aging.

The exhibition that recently concluded at Hauser & Wirth in New York’s SoHo neighborhood is not a sudden arrival. It is the final stage of a journey spanning half a century. Looking back on her career, we discover that aging was already a central theme even before she was born. As early as her series *Untitled Film Stills* (the black-and-white series from 1977–1980, in which she portrayed characters inspired by film noir, and whose collection of prints sold at Christie’s for $6.77 million), Sherman explored identity and its fragilities, incorporating female stereotypes popularized by cinema, advertising, and fashion magazines.

The point is this: for Sherman, the face has never been a given. It has always been an artifice. A conscious construction, a chosen mask. And it is here, half a century later, that the connection with today’s twenty-somethings begins.

Wrinkles as a language, not as a phrase

The explicit confrontation with age came in 2016 with *The Flappers*, dedicated to the Hollywood divas of the 1920s (Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo)—not for how they were, but for how they would become. Aged. Sherman was 62 years old and hadn’t been photographed for five years. In *The Guardian* in 2016, she explained an important distinction: “My goal wasn’t to add wrinkles to look older, but to use wrinkles to communicate.”

Using wrinkles to communicate. Not merely enduring them: speaking through them. These women, she said, “have survived; they’ve been through a lot. You can see the pain on their faces, but they’re looking toward the future; they’re focused on what lies ahead.” The pain remains etched there, but it doesn’t dictate the rules. It’s an element, not a sentence.

The Scientific Perspective

There is a scientific term that gives an almost literal name to this “excruciating pain.” It’s called accelerated biological aging: chronic psychological stress, when the nervous system remains in a state of high alert for long periods, keeps cortisol levels elevated, fuels inflammation, and slows cellular repair. Research by Elizabeth Blackburn, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, has linked prolonged emotional stress to the shortening of telomeres, the markers of cellular age. Essentially, the body does not distinguish between a present threat and a remembered one. It keeps track. The difference between Sherman and this body that silently records everything lies in the verb. She uses.

The rest of us often suffer as a result.

The same gesture, two opposites.

And this is where Cindy Sherman’s work suddenly, almost inexplicably, becomes contemporary. Because her method, today, transcends mere museum art. In her studio in TriBeCa, she adds a layer of post-production to the facial transformation itself—a process that applies equally to her museum-bound works and her Instagram posts. She herself has observed: “It’s interesting to note how using apps for my Instagram portraits has made me rethink the way I use Photoshop for these images; in reality, it’s not all that different.”

It’s not all that different. Retouching gallery photos and applying filters to feed photos are the same gesture. The same logic of the mask. But this gesture lies at the heart of the entire generational divide.

For Sherman, it’s about self-determination. She chooses the mask, wears it with biting irony, and signs it. Her women are energetic, ironic, and interesting, aware that their identity is not determined by age, but by the present moment. For her, the mask is an act of control.

For those who grew up using digital platforms, the same tool works in reverse. Retouching an image isn’t a choice, but the norm. Self-presentation isn’t a high-impact performance, but mandatory maintenance. And while Sherman used to artificially accentuate wrinkles to “communicate,” she now confides to the Financial Times the other side of the coin: with new cameras, “every wrinkle, every little imperfection, every pore I have is highlighted.” The platforms where she posts are designed to amplify precisely what she asks to hide.

Where a generation is truly aging.

It’s the paradox of today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings: never have they been so well-informed about suffering (trauma, emotional regulation, and the window of tolerance have entered everyday vocabulary), yet never have they been so exposed to the environments that fuel it. Even mental health has become a recognizable aesthetic: earthy color palettes, comforting illustrations, and slideshows that explain a disorder in ten slides. A language used while doing the opposite of what it says. Phrases about slowing down are forgotten with a quick swipe.

Sherman has navigated fifty years of images without ever confusing the mask with the face. “I won’t face the arrival of old age in silence or with joy,” she told The New York Times. “This is what you’ll become, so get used to it. It’s coming.” He says this with a laugh, with the serenity of someone who has always known that the image is a construct. The question that remains open concerns those who haven’t chosen this awareness but have been breathing it in since childhood through a screen: what does it mean to age well, when the very tool for reinventing yourself is the same one that never stops asking you to stay?