Monday, July 20, 2009

Self-Destruction as Art

The National Review cruise around the Mediterranean these last ten days included Rome, Dubrovnik, Corfu, Ephesus, Athens, all places where our civilization took shape. Ruins from the classical period, mosaics and painted rooms, medieval fortresses, churches and cloisters, sculpture, pictures, variously amount to a statement of what mankind at its best can create, and what these works tell us about ourselves and why they are worth visiting and preserving. And then almost the first thing I encounter back on shore is the obituary in the Daily Telegraph of one Dashiell Snow. This told a sad story, but more than that, it was a negation of everything we’d been seeing and doing on the way round the Mediterranean, a sort of anti-cruise.

I had never heard of this poor Dash Snow, needless to say. He had been born in New York in 1981, into the very well known de Menil family, heirs to the Schlumberger fortune that comes from oil and related technology, and collectors of art as well. Here was one of the lucky ones for whom privilege was a birth-right. And what did he make of it? Already at 13, he had to be sent to reform school in Georgia. Soon he was stealing, drifting to the lower East Side in Manhattan, drinking himself silly, and then starting the “Irak graffiti crew” specialising in theft and in daubing walls. Through pursed lips, the Telegraph says the photographs these people took were “explicit portrayals of the sexual and drug-taking excesses of his circle,” and they “created a popular stir.” Hedge-fund managers, visual-arts editors, gallery owners, and such like, thought he was one of the most talented artists in New York. But this involved shredding phone books, blankets, and curtains, to make “a hamster nest” in which to curl up and take drugs. Once he destroyed 2,000 phone books over five nights. A drug overdose killed him at the age of 27.

What a mirror held up to our times! For Snow himself, it is possible only to feel pity. What he was doing has nothing to tell other people, but was merely bad mannered, devoid of anything imaginative, creative, and human. The de Menil wealth probably gave him some sense that he didn’t have to work but was free to indulge in whatever he liked. For the fawning gallery owners and visual-arts editors, though, it is possible only to feel rage. Those who flattered and encouraged Snow should properly be held responsible for his degradation and early death. Everything he did was bogus or self-destructing, and they called it art. 

07/20 02:09 PMShare