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This is going to be sort of a broad topic, since I'm not quite sure where I'm going yet, but here's a brief summary:</p>
For my AP Art portolio, I need to assemble a series of pieces based on a common theme. At the moment, I have a swirling of aesthetic ideas, designs, concepts and literature that I'm slowly tangling into an unorganized, loosely connected ball, of which eventually I am going to organize a paper or writing piece to include a series of pieces loosely based primarily on ideas I've culled from my interests in Fashion, in Nihilism as the modern youth's "philosophy of death," and a myriad of other concepts that I'm start to tie together. I'll paraphrase what I have (more or less) so far (I can't find my notes, so this is neither an attempt to be comprehensive or well written), and is mostly an attempt to get across the ideas / the "gist" of what I'm working towards.</p>
First, the essential death of a meta-narrative for most modern youth leads to a "nihilistic" outlook on life, less founded on actual philosophical education than on a simple lack of a belief structure. Modern communications and the moving away from tradition means of information distribution (phrase stolen from Fuuma!) has led to a massive splintering of interest and context for Youth culture, and as adult co-opting and paranoia, as well as geography and the aforementioned change in communication/information destroys most local unifiers (the music "scenes" and so on). Ultimately, among many not interested in accepting lesser, and arguably more pointless goals, (such as "make as much money as possible"), schooling and ambition becomes irrelevant and the only diversion becomes interest in drugs, alcohol and sexual encounters. Nihilism has been a topic widely written on, and widely discussed, by many famous authors, such as Turgenev and Kafka. However, these authors do not offer solutions to this problem, and Kafka himself rarely escapes from the grasp of the misery largely inherent in Nihilism. Instead, I will look to the idea(s) presented by Hemingway, whose works are, in my opinion, the most important literary works in regards to living life in a time with no meta-narrative and no belief structure.
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(references / information are a letter from a teenager on the topic to a newspaper, discussion with / my professors thesis on Nihilism, Turgenev / Kafka / Hemingway as well, obviously. As soon as I find my notes I'll get the quotes / citations up.)</p>
My goal is to offer a new ideal or at least a means of living that does not necessarily require either through fashion / design / unifying youth culture. Raf Simons work becomes notable here in the manner that it examines Youth's Culture and its context in the world, but it does not attempt to give it a meaning or reason, merely observes and constructs, largely. Taking ideas from Raf, I'm looking to examine recent youth "movements," most notably the American Surf Movement (at it's very beginning) as giving meaning to the youth in an existential and aesthetic context, and attempt to apply their ideals and goals to a new youth "movement" based on uniting behind post-modern ideals and modern aesthetic ideals.</p>
Anyway, that's most of it. I haven't gotten some of the ideas worked out, may remove some, may add some, etc... </p>
I thought I'd put it up here to see if anyone has any thoughts, and, most importantly, any books that may relate to the subject. So far, I'm looking at ordering: Raf Simons Redux as well as The Fourth Sex (anyone know if there would be anything useful in these? Pictures are nice, but articles are better), Gilles Lipovetsky's The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Francesco Bonami and other's Uniform: Order and Disorder.</p>
So far, the ideas I've presented are fairly static, so I'm examing Uniforms, the context of clothing in modern society (especially amongst youth), and so on... to try and find more directions to examine or take.</p>
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