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 Garçons, Stüssy, 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. The young always have the same problem--how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. --Quentin Crisp The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires. --Dorothy ParkerToo many of today's children have straight teeth and crooked morals. --Unknown high school principal Adolescence is just one big walking pimple. --Carol Burnett

从总体上说，人类以往的历史是一部深藏于典籍的丛林之中的历史，说像一条在黑夜之中流动着的巨大河流那样，它依赖于各种文字和给画的复杂记录，并且需要通过人们非凡的想像力才能被我们依稀辨认出来，这种状况持续了数千年之久，以致于当我们回溯这段漫长的历史时，就像在黑夜下艰难地航行，这便是我们将一个世纪以来重要的事件照片汇集在一起，编著这样一部大型图书的目的。