Remembering Dash Snow

Back in the day, when I was an editor at a hip art and fashion magazine, we used to joke that Dash Snow was pretty much everything wrong with the art world: a "self-taught" junkie tagger kid who popped up in Adriano Goldschmied ads and whose legacy in the art world gave him carte blanche to fuck whomever he wanted. It was a joke, of course, and I went to see a lot of his work at different galleries around New York. So when my art handler friend Juan texted me yesterday morning that Snow passed away from a heroin overdose, I was pretty shocked, because whenever I ran into Dash at this New Year’s Eve party or that LES basement fashion show he was always a nice, mellow dude.

First things first. We all know he came from auspicious beginnings. His legacy is that of great art patronage, the result of the Schlumberger family’s oil equipment success in the 1920s. His great grandmother, a Schlumberger heiress, started the storied Menil Collection in Houston (known for its vast amount of work from the surrealists) and his great aunt founded the Dia Foundation. He even went to the Dalton School at a young age. At some point though, Dash rejected all that. That was the thing about him. He had it all, but he gave it up to found the IRAK graffiti crew, to put together the infamous "Nest" show at Deitch Gallery (he rolled around in a room of shredded telephone books with collaborator Dan Colen, along with Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden, A-Ron and a bunch of other kids pissing, spitting, throwing things at each other). He took pretty, ethereal photographs of junkies shooting up and hookers giving blow jobs. It all came back in the form of art world success. Along with all that came, of course, the drugs.

And despite his very public usage, it got to be too much for even his family to handle. Last year, when I interviewed his brother Maxwell (Max had recently opened his own gallery with a solo show of his own work), I got the impression that Dash wasn’t exactly a part of that family any longer. "I don’t talk to him anymore," said Max, in a way that said, "Don’t ask me anything else about Dash, or I’m done."

But, for the most part, Dash wasn’t a reject. He was a prince of the scene, or as someone near and dear to him recently posted on her Facebook, he was an "angel." And he definitely wasn’t everything that was wrong with the art world. The sad thing is, it’s really hard for a junkie to O.D., and I know he’d just come out of rehab, so he was making a concerted effort to get clean. Maybe he was selfish for going out with a needle in his arm, but when all is said and done, he’ll be remembered for being one of the loudest voices of a group of artists that, despite their troubles, injected some energy into the same ol’ same ol’.

What do you think?