Omnivorous and indefatigable, suggestible but independent, adolescents don't want to be balanced. They love extremes of everything from fashion and art to music and the Internet. Observed and studied by experts of all kinds, their behavior monitored by psychologists, educators, and marketing executives, adolescents represent a decisive and increasingly valuable segment of the buying public. They adore and consume trendy clothes and brand-new bands; they must be cool regardless of the cost. And adults turn to them more and more for clues on how to remain forever young and hip. The Fourth Sex turns a critical, illustrated spotlight on adolescence, a territory of transition crisscrossed by the most varied creative energies. A series of iconographic materials begins in the 1960s and moves up to the present, revealing clothes, behavior patterns, novels, and visual artworks created or inspired by the transnational tribe that are teenagers. Excerpted authors include David Foster Wallace, Arata Isozaki, Philip Roth, William Golding, J.G. Ballard, Beavis & Butthead, Jim Carroll, Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov, Douglas Coupland, Dick Hebdige, Bret Easton Ellis, and Dave Eggers. Represented artists include Vanessa Beecroft, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Charles Ray, Takashi Murakami, Larry Clark, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince, Gilbert & George, Gavin Turk, and Richard Billingham. And modeled fashion and lifestyle designers include Malcolm MacLaren, Paco Rabanne, Benetton, Veronique Branquinho, Comme des Gar°ons, Stssy, Coca-Cola, PlayStation, Diesel, Katherine Hamnett, and David Sims. The book's shifting, politically incorrect graphic style gives form and color to all the contradictions and ambiguities of an unhappy age that we never cease to remember with nostalgia and the occasional twinge of pain. Published in association with Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery.
If we consider the male, female and homosexual as the first, second and third sex, the fourth sex might be that of adolescents. But adolescence is above all a sexually undefined state. Teenagers are not little boys or little girls, and they are not yet men or women. They are part of a parallel, fluid universe in a state of becoming. They belong decisively to the present, but in symbolic terms they are the seeds of the future. Adolescence is also a state of mind, an existential condition with a powerful impact on lifestyles and trends. Teenagers are omnivorous, tireless consumers, careless but at times attentive, easily influenced but autonomous. Off balance between the presence and the future, they seem overexcited and at the same time strangely passive. They often give form to their world and their culture in an aggressive manner, but at the same time they are forced to come to grips with the labels, jugments and formulae of adults. Their behaviour patterns are constantly monitored because they represent a decisive segment of the strategy of consumption. They love clothes, music, technology… Fashion pays particularly close attention to the teenage universe both as a source of inpsiration and as a crucial consumer segment, while contemporary art probes, exploits and analyzes the myth of the eternal adolescent. This book is constructed with images of fashion, art, music, cinema and the news, accompanied by an anthology of writings that mixes poetry, literature, journalism and research, highlighting the increasing importance of the teenage tribe in a society such as ours, where the inadequacy of sexual and demographic identities is reflected in a violent, contradictory way in the social changes in progress.
