© Dash Snow
All the things that always aggravated me about Terry Richardson, apply to Snow. Lack of talent or expertise was passed off as intent and the world of art suffered as another bullshit artist peddled their bullshit wares. I maintain that without a wealthy art-collector aunt, Snow would have remained out of the art circuit and thus off of this page. Akin to how Richardson really worked his father's connections and kept doing his own thing until it was attributed to be his "style" or how Andy Warhol was really a talentless hack thrust into limelight out of sheer adoration of his awkwardness; Snow was your atypical hipster hero, and the injustice of it all continued to inspire his rebellion.
However, while I don't necessarily maintain he was "an artist," he was however a creative, and equally tragic, individual. His work has shown in Vice magazine (which isn't really saying anything other than that the guy could party, given his published work), and he had a budding following, including reviews from Juxtapoz to the New York Times, and his death has garnered support for his work. A collection of his polaroids create a portrait of the man's life, and he appears to have stoked his fire and burned his fuel out long before we could really be presented his true body of work. And, like Arizona State to Obama, I am going to withhold any praise due to his current body of work.
I must admit, though, that he captured interesting moments in an interesting life at an interesting threshold of events. His journalistic intentions of capturing his life appear both pretentious and self-glorifying, and of the type that I generally despise due to the sheer onslaught and overabundance of said type of art, but I admire the situations he put himself in though I would prefer to have stumbled upon a shoebox full of these images ten years from now in someone's forgotten closet than on the Art Beat on the New York Times' website. When I first became aware of his artwork, it was via Vice Magazine's Photo Book. Amongst that context, his work fits in, but does not stand out, except perhaps for the humor. The above image is one of my favorites, for reasons I do not believe were intended (such as the cutoffs because the Polaroid camera he was probably using was most definitely not equipped with a viewfinder, so the composition was definitely just a happy accident). This worship of false idols angers, excites, and forces me to create and to justify not only my opinion, but my own body of work and set of skills. In this, I consider Dash Snow to be a powerful inspiration.
