Dash Snow

OK, I confess. I didn't know who he was at first. Being the suburban creative director that I am, I'm a little slow on the uptake and behind the times on the hip downtown artists.

Bitter? Guilty as charged. I have just never had much tolerance for trust funders who call themselves artists. It's probably a bad trait of mine. Why be so angry? Why not give the guy a break? Why you be hatin', C?

I dunno. I just don't know if it is possible to be hardcore if you grew up as art royalty. He's sort of disqualified from day one.

So, what does it mean to me? Well, I see the guy's Polaroid work, and I think about my good friend, Steven Cloud, who has been doing shit like that for years. OK, so maybe no pictures of penises (that I know of), but I just feel like this Snow fellow gets a little advantage that most of us wouldn't get and for that I hate him. But, I do enjoy art, particularly provocative art -- and, to a degree I'll give him a pass. I even like partying hard, although I have never done H, and I never plan to. My brother, who got hit by a car was a big fan of Dylan Thomas who basically drank himself to death. So, I sort of romanticize the tortured, fucked up artist persona more than most. And for some reason, all of a sudden, I am thinking about Layne Stanley, who I think captured that heroin addiction vibe quite well on one of my favorite albums, Dirt.

Back to the formula. Give the information age that we dwell in, there is no shortage of hyperlinks, trivia, videos, and Tweets to be had from a contemporary artist. For some of these older folks, I have to work all night just to find a decent link, but anybody famous and under thirty is well-indexed.