Phillips de Pury’s day sale didn’t add much excitement with £1.8m in sales but this Dash Snow work that had been estimated at £20-30k brought in a respectable £63,650.
Snow Show
Alexandra Peers keeps mining the Dash Snow vein no matter how tangential. The latest New York Magazine Intelligencer item isolates New York as the white-hot center of the world’s art trends:
The New York art scene is in the midst of “a renaissance,” says Kathy Grayson, curator of the show and director of Deitch Projects Gallery, where she met Barzan. The city is headquarters now to not one but three historically important art trends, says Grayson: “Street Punk” (Dash Snow, Kembra Pfahler, Terence Koh), “Wild Figuration” (Jules de Balincourt, Takashi Murata), and the “New Abstraction” (Dan Colen, Sterling Ruby). (Perhaps not incidentally, a spate of the artists in the show have shown at Deitch.) Continue Reading
Balder Dash
Anthony Haden-Guest gets his oar into the Dash Snow phenomenon on The Daily Beast and provides some valuable context. Where so many focus on Snow’s status as the member of a wealthy family, Haden-Guest looks at the de Menil patrimony in the art world.
He goes on to point out another important observation that Snow did little to present himself as an ambitious artist. Many may have invested themselves in the idea of Snow as a meaningful artist but not Snow himself:Continue Reading
Dashed Hopes
[intro]After a Week of Hagiography Comes the Dash Snow Takedown[/intro]
Stephen Marche writes for Esquire but he published this puncturing of the Dash Snow myth in the Toronto Star. The gist of it is that Snow didn’t create much in the way of art but seemed to have inspired the hipster fascination with bad behavior:
They usually begin by identifying him as an artist but nobody really wants to talk about his art. He was a fascinating muse for other artists, but his lifestyle is the most interesting thing about him, involving as it did a devotion to every kind of hedonism possible when a person has no respect for taboos and pots and pots of money. The style of his death also represents the end of a particular moment in the life of American art, the logical conclusion of its utter submission to the glut of money fuelled by fraudulent financial instruments pumping through the world’s major cities before the crash. He was an icon of a nasty and empty art so cynical it amounted nearly to nihilism.Snow was also, in a very direct way, one of the most influential forces on popular culture. Gavin McInnes, the founder of the hipster bible Vice magazine, literally used to follow Snow around recording the smallest detail of his life. The fact is you’ve seen Dash Snow. You can see him on Ossington tonight if you want. He’s the trucker-hat-donning, skinny-jeans-wearing, Pabst-Blue-Ribbon-drinking, Converse-shoe-stepping trustafarian hipster of the past decade who thinks that the good life is staying up until eight in the morning snorting blow in the toilet stalls at after-hours clubs. […]Continue Reading
Snow Ball
Alexandra Peers is already speculating on prices for Dash Snow’s work now that he’s been declared the new Basquiat with a compelling personal story, scene-setting publicity in the form of magazine profile and coterie of famous friends. But there are more than a few problems with predicting prices based simply on whether the artist is above ground.
But Andy Warhol died at the beginning of a huge art-market boom, Snow at the end of one — “and before he really made enough work for people to make a market in it,” says one auction-house official, who, like several others in the art world, preferred not to be quoted on the financial value of the artist’s legacy. Plus, Snow’s early works are Polaroids, which are known to age badly. Some experts say the near-term arc of Snow’s prices may be more similar to that of fellow graffiti artist Keith Haring, who died in 1990. The art market, tanking at the time, was flooded with too many Harings after his death, pushing down prices.Continue Reading
