Elitism in Art Fashion Music Sex
Language and Cultural Expansion

Kofi Fosu Forson

Language has always belonged to the elite. Now that the world is expanding... Elitism is a self defeatist proposition.

F Scott Fitzgerald for me was a passage way into the future. It brought an awareness in literature much the way bebop did for music. Our world experienced a transatlantic interaction based on conscience. Intellectual light traveled faster based on the populace seeking knowledge and diversity in these works of literature. There was a stark honesty and beauty that fell from these pages into their minds. 

The carry over was quite amazing as American authors of this time encouraged such a brilliant use of language as seen in novels by Hemingway and Faulkner. 

Those who followed whether Henry Miller, Norman Mailer or William Burroughs and The Beat Generation were driven by their egos. This had a lot to do with marketing of pop culture idols and Hollywood marquee stars. Works of literature at this time was also influenced by sex and drugs.

Marketing of poets such as Allen Gingsburg Robert Lowell and Wallace Stevens brought a sense of human experience to  literature. Time when a cause and concern was more revolutionary. Therefore these words written were academic but took on a tone of lessons from the human condition. 

They became exemplary in what followed from photography to music fashion art and sex. Life on the street influenced much of what was being said in boardrooms offices and art galleries. 

As far as women and photography there was Diane Arbus and later with Nan Goldin. The energy driven from these works of art were examples of a street conscience which became the hip hop culture and late 70's to 80's cable porn where pornographers like Al Goldstein and UGLY GEORGE more so than Larry Flynt were encouraging the word "smut."

The 90's as a HOT Decade brought a sense of disillusionment much of this perhaps was taken from rediscovery of heroin as a recreational drug, post AIDS orgiastic euphoria, gangsta violence, death of celebrated artists as author Kathy Acker and rocker Kurt Cobain. This decade also provided us with a post feminist movement in writers like Camille Paglia Naomi Wolfe. 

Jenny Shimizu spearheaded the androgyny/lesbian model movement which changed the world. Fetish photography was big at this point. Transcended the element of high fashion with an underground sense of sexual behavior relating back to Masoch's Venus in Furs. This for the most part was pre internet porn.

Internet porn was a combustion which still to this day doesn't make sense. But culturally it gives the people what they want. 

Elitism and academia was a form of abstraction. Keep cultures confined. Through time we have experienced an expansion. How do we safeguard intellect from brutality. 

The 90's were about a heightened conscience which paved way for technology.

We don't think for ourselves it seems.

We just react.