Friday, July 13, 2007

Vile

Ladies and gentlemen, we have hit the modern art motherlode. If you are irritated by Banksy’s feeble pictorial metaphors and his tiresome band of metro-wank apologists, brace yourself for the poisonous Dash Snow.

This fawning hagiographic shit-stream comes courteousy of Ariel Levy, a New York Magazine hack.

Charlie Brooker said he wrapped up his TV Go Home site because television had become so absurdly dunder-headed that it was beyond parody. He cited as an example the show ‘Touch The Truck’, in which someone is rewarded for touching a truck for a lengthy period of time. When I first read about Dash Snow I thought it had to be the work of Brooker or Chris Morris. But no, it’s horribly real.

"The artist Dash Snow rammed a screwdriver into his buzzer the other day. He has no phone. He doesn’t use e-mail."

Bohemian.

"So now, if you want to speak to him, you have to go by his apartment on Bowery and yell up."

Edgy.

"Lorax-like, he won’t come to the window to let you see that he sees you: He has a periscope he puts up so he can check you out first."

Retro-eccentric!

"Partly, it comes from his graffiti days, this elusiveness, the recent adolescence the 25-year-old Snow spent tagging the city and dodging the police."

Dangerous. Straddling the line between crime and art!

“He’s pretty paranoid about lots of things in general, and some of it was dished out to him, but others he’s created himself,” says Snow’s friend, the 27-year-old artist Dan Colen, who—like so many of their friends—has made significant artistic contributions to the ever-expanding mythology of Dash Snow.

Enigmatic!

"Colen and Snow went to London together this fall for the Saatchi show in which they both had work. (Saatchi had bought one of Colen’s sculptures for $500,000.)"

Seal of approval!

"Saatchi got them a fancy hotel room on Piccadilly. They had to flee it in the middle of the night with their suitcases before it was discovered that they’d created one of their Hamster’s Nests, which they’ve done quite a few times before. To make a Hamster’s Nest, Snow and Colen shred up 30 to 50 phone books, yank around all the blankets and drapes, turn on the taps, take off their clothes, and do drugs—mushrooms, coke, ecstasy—until they feel like hamsters."

Wow. Wow. Ensuring underpaid hotel cleaners have a really hard day at work. Smearing your privileged foie-gras shit in the faces of the working class. That's so now... just so... so brave.

"McGinley was lying on the floor next to stacks of the New York Post and the Daily News with words and pictures cut out of them. “I’ve always been a big fan of the Post, and I remember in 1992, or whenever the fuck it was, Desert Storm, the Gulf War? Remember? I’d always read the Post, and there’d be really rad headlines about it,” said Snow. “I was just down for it! I’m down with anyone, even if they’re bad people, if they’re just, like, anti-American, you know what I mean? This is a series I’m working on,” he pointed at some collages on the wall with lots of pictures of Saddam Hussein, whose likeness is also tattooed on Snow’s arm. “They’re old headlines, and they all have come on them. Yeah, mine.”

I fought with this for hours. Am I giving this more time than it deserves? Isn’t it just spoilt kids fucking around in their trust-funded bubbles? Doesn’t it merit no more than a laconic dismissal?

No. No, no, no. The correct response is disgust. There is a moral duty to be outraged. This is art at its most decadent, ignorant and socially parasitical. It’s enough to turn me into a Trotskyist class warrior. Dash Snow, all his toadying friends and the wretched witch that wrote this should be sent to Abu Ghraib. They should be allowed to escape, just so they can be sent back again. Repeat until dead.

----------------------------------------------

Last night I had the dream that has been seared into the collective consciousness and troubled millions. I was in a plane that had been seized by terrorists. It was, inevitably, being flown into a building. I was preparing to be murdered. At my side was a glorious Islamic martyr, staring at me with a vicious pride. The last thing I wanted to see when I died was the triumphant face of a deluded idiot. So I looked at the building we were crashing towards and tried to think about architecture as I began to suffocate.

I hope it was Dash Snow's apartment.

9 comments:

Tom P said...

On the plus side I can't believe many people are going to make it through all nine pages of that crap.

Do we ever find out what his art involves, you know besides the kind totally mind blowing behavior that 15 year olds do on school trips to France?

I guess his 'art' is the same as Paris Hilton's. Good old fashioned self publicity.

Neil Stewart said...

Truly the worst article ever. The guy should do a Richard Geefe and top himself!

Unknown said...

Aye, Dash Snow's one of those artists for whom there are so many reasons he's a twat that trying to summarise his twattery causes the tongue to become jammed with hundreds of words trying to get out at once, resulting in a kind of "nnnggg" noise before you punch him.

Is it art? Isn't it? Yes, it's art. Give it up, Snow, we know that trick. It's rubbish art. You suck. The fact that dozens of art journalists are so terrified of being branded ignorant luddites that they'll deify any piece of empty sensationalist wank that gains any popularity does not lend legitimacy to Snow's work. It just illegimises their own cowardly opinions.

People like Dash Snow are forever under the impression that they're part of some movement of new thinking, holding up the mirror to the blah blah zeitgeist blah ignorant proles blah. I think the real revolution is the "for fuck's sake" generation. The generation that stands up and says "you can't really expect me to swallow that shit, can you, it's just a load of pictures of you and your mates doing coke with your pants off, that's bollocks, that is". It'll be great, indymedia will get replaced with "fucksakeunderground", a militant movement that jumps groups of unsuspecting anarko-drones with irate lectures on how they should really get a fucking grip and have a cup of tea.

Nick Talbot said...

Yes, I certainly couldn't read the whole article. Just enough to check it wasn't a spoof.

I still can't work out who is worse, Dash Snow or the people that buy his work and write about him.

The 'Fucksakeundergound' sounds like my spiritual home.

paul said...

Sounds like New York's answer to Nathan Barley, and i bet they've got a bunch of contenders too... for fuck's sake indeed.

Anton Maiof said...

the important thing is Tracker3 is still down.

Ian Mac said...

Great dissection of this outrageously wanky piece, which I had already (sadly) read all the way through in the Observer magazine. Hateful people, hateful journalist. It was truly crying out for some well-deserved bile.
Well done, Mr. Talbot.

Nick Talbot said...

Christ, was it in the Observer too? That's enough to make me read the Daily Mail.

Anonymous said...

what a bag of twats