Dash Snow: Art Circle Jerk

Dash Snow caught the attention of the art world a few years ago with his headline collages, pictures of oral sex, nude girls, cocaine being snorted off body parts, and "making art by ejaculating on copies of The New York Post." His "art" soon caught on with the patrons who gladly paid five figures to have a Snow in the house. About two weeks ago, he died of a drug overdose at the age of 27, the quintessential up and coming artist.

The New York Times gave him a one-page obituary on July 15 followed by three pages on July 24 delving into his family, his world, his troubled last days, and his "contribution" to art. It reads like a parody. Susan Alexander's opera career comes to mind. It says as much about the state of the Times and the art world as it does about an immensely rich, overindulged, degenerate, angry, lost soul hellbent on self-destruction.

You may ask how 20th century art in the United States got to where it is today. In his wonderful little essay, The Painted Word, written in 1975, Tom Wolfe took art critics and modern art to the woodshed for a good thrashing. Obviously, it was not well received among art circles, but much of what he said has played out into reality in the past three decades.

Basically, his thesis described modern art as having lost all sense of art itself, emerging as theory represented by words spewing from a tight circle of critics. I don't agree with Wolfe completely. We still have "artists" expressing themselves, but it's another world:

"In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs". After providing examples of other techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe concluded with conceptual art: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. … Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory! [Wikipedia: The Painted Word]

I'm saddened by Snow's death and angered, first, that there was no successful intervention somewhere in his life, and second, that our society has devalued art so much that talent is no longer required. Today, art happens, anything goes. This is why I draw my Weimar Republic parallels you have read about earlier on OTR.

Credit my daughter with tipping me off to the Instapundit post and its link to Althouse where the comments are a must read.