My friend recently sent me this article about Dash Snow, and it got me thinking about art scenes and the art they produce. Figures like Dash Snow are encased in such huge a mythic aura, they are celebrities. If you google image his name you get an assorted collection of mostly Polaroid images of him and his friends fucking around, getting fucked up, or actually fucking. A white guy blowing a line off a black penis, a sad looking threesome, some one shooting up, more naked sad looking strung out girls... this is not to say that he didn't produce anything of value. The article lists a couple working ideas like : skull cum shots (he literal cums on skulls) and puts glitter on them to in his words "make them pretty". Or his hamster nests where he and his friends would take a bunch of drugs and destroy a hotel room, shredding phone books to make a hamster nest (I like the hamster nest idea better then the skull cum shoots...)
But anything he did create only further feed a legendary image of himself. He lived a crazy life of his own choosing. I can't help but be pulled in the the romantic, self destructive, liberating, rebellious nature of it all. there is something so appealing about people who live out our fantasies for us. Instead of living a normal, well adjusted life that follows the pattern we have all grown so accustom to, some people, like Dash Snow, live an alternate reality full of drugs & partying that runs up against a mortality that normal people run away from. As I was looking up stuff about him on the web, I found a lot of sites commenting on his "shocking" death - while his death is tragic, especially because he leaves behind a daughter, I wouldn't say its all that shocking or even surprising. he and WE understood the risks he was taking and we watched. Art scenes sell vicarious living. What the scene creates is a myth, an aura, which can be sold as the art it self. Its the ultimate form of representation. The representation of a life style. As the watching audience, we can live out our self destructive fantasies that we are too scared to realize, all from the safety of our normal, well adjusted lives.
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