House party in Williamsburg, eight years ago: the entry way is clogged with piles of spilled magazines; they slip and slide underfoot as I walk towards the living room, where a pretty, twenty-something-year-old boy sporting self-conscious clothes and hair crouches over a keyboard, pressing out long, laborious notes. A mangy dog wanders past him, towards another boy seated in the corner. Having beckoned the dog over, the boy then leans into its face to shotgun the animal with a plume of marijuana smoke. In the kitchen, a third boy concocts something in a large blender. He’s pouring in every ingredient he can find from the cabinets and refrigerator—soy sauce, raw eggs, maple syrup—and once they’re blended, he gleefully drinks the murky liquid out of the side, proclaiming, “This is what I eat every day!” Over his shoulder, out in the backyard, the fourth inhabitant of the house is busy setting a mattress on fire.
Add a reporter from New York Magazine to this mix, or Patrick McMullan and his camera crew, and any of these guys might be the next Dash Snow. They have a lot in common with Snow, the heavily stylized “downtown” artist whose works (newspaper clippings sprayed with ejaculate) sell in various galleries around the world. Like Snow, they are upper middle class white guys who decamped to New York from various assorted suburbs to be artists. But they’ve skipped the actual art part in favor of developing a cult of personality. Any art they make is, at best, an accessory for their constructed persona. They live their lives with an eye to some grand, future memoir in the sky, one that will feature memorable lines like, “Those are spit circles. I was sick and I’d just wake up with a chest full of phlegm and spit all over the paper and make circles, you know?” or “I’m going to do a come-shot series on the faces of the skulls, but after I come on them, I’ll throw glitter on them to make it pretty.”
I first read about Snow in the article “Chasing Dash Snow” (from which the above quotes are taken) by Ariel Levy, which appeared in the January 7, 2007 issue of New York Magazine. Besides the lyrics to Pulp’s song 'Common People', two major essays came to mind when I read her piece: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”. The former essay because it was obvious Snow and his friends Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen were slumming it, adopting the trappings of the poor and downtrodden (shoplifting rap sheets, bum’s beards, and, most appallingly, proudly won bruises from police beatings—even though Mailer’s essay is a little dated, these guys were indeed “urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts”), and the latter essay because their lifestyle was unequivocally “life as theater”.
Plenty of other artists and aesthetes fancied themselves protagonists in their own little movies. The magazine’s cover proclaimed Snow, McGinley, and Colen “Warhol’s Children”, and Warhol was constantly mythologizing himself. But he was also devoting just as much time to the creation of sublime artwork that held equal importance to any of his happenings. To quote Sontag, “One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying”.
Okay, so maybe Warhol wasn’t exactly naïve. But he was marginally innocent to his own image in a way that Snow and his ilk never will be. If there is one reason to not completely detest Snow, it’s that our post-post-post-modernist world doesn’t allow for naïveté when it comes to representing yourself anymore. In a way, then, he can't help himself. McGinley gained fame by photographing his friends, including Snow, in the impressionistic, hedonistic tradition of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, but his portraits can never be as honest because his subjects are aware of the work of Goldin and Clark (even Goldin herself can’t take truly candid photographs of young people anymore). They are complicit in their own depiction, and it gives any cavorting for the camera an inescapable performative quality. Mailer wrote, “Hip is a special language that cannot really be taught.” That no longer holds true.
“Camp…incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’, ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’, of ‘irony’ over ‘tragedy’”, says Sontag, and this is in evidence with Snow. His cynical dalliance with art is unfortunately common in today’s art scene, enabled by the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, star-fucking curators and over-the-top art festivals. There is no craft, no heart, nothing but cold-eyed cynicism and empty signifiers. The art dealers who love Snow get a thrill rubbing up against him; he’s just the right mix of the Other (a petty criminal! a graffiti artist! maybe he’ll do a bump right here in my office!) and the safe (he is a De Menil, after all). They are desperate to find that “magic flash of insanity, framed and for sale”, and Snow knows just how to deliver it. His sexy beast persona is so calculated you can almost hear him mulling the semiotics over in his head: “Saddam Hussein tattoo, check. Crackpipe, check. Shoplifted birdhouse, check.” Snow embodies “...the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm” (in Snow’s case, literally). Even more prescient than Mailer, Sontag neatly sums up Snow's career and the landscape it romps in: “[Camp is] a feat goaded on by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence”.
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