Dash Snow, Dead at 27

I’m a little late with this, but I just found out that Dash Snow died of a heroin overdose earlier this week. I am confounded by his death because although its tragic, it was almost too predictable to even be bothered by. The art world fueled his death with praise and recognition for living a lifestyle they deemed worthy of a true artistic genius (note: he wasn’t), and in the end got exactly what they wanted, another very young and very dead artist to auction off.

Hard-living, cop-dodging New York collage artist, photographer, and graffiti writer Dash Snow has died of a drug overdose at 27. Gawker broke the news this morning and now the Times has received confirmation from Snow’s grandmother, art collector Christophe de Menil, that he passed away last night at downtown hotel Lafayette House. According to De Menil, he’d been in rehab in March and had only recently started using again.

Dash Snow so embodied everything that the art world wanted since the end of the Warhol era that he even died at the same age, and by the same means (heroin overdose), as Jean-Michel Basquiat. Perfect, I know.

Which is, of course, what the art world has always wanted, especially in New York City, what Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning supplied, along with genius. That magic flash of insanity, framed and for sale. – Ariel Levy

But lets be perfectly clear: Dash Snow wasn’t an authentic life-loving-party-obsessed-20-something, he was simply the by product of a ruthless art market looking for the next commodity to push across the stage of Sothebys. He was manifested out of a need for the authentic, wherein he was subsequently killed by it.

…some see in his work a kind of radical authenticity that parts of the art world are desperate for. “Whether it’s total bullshit and he’s running around trying to get in trouble with the police, it kind of doesn’t matter,” says art agent and consultant Molly Logan. “As a case study, here’s a creature who’s just reacting. I think that for the last five years or so, there is a larger desire for the personal: something that has the hand of a person in it. It’s not I’m going to do this so people will think I’m crazy. I am crazy! I think he’s genuinely and completely self-destructive.” – Ariel Levy

And now the art world can truly enjoy the mastery of their creation as they begin to market the work of a dead Dash Snow.

With artist Dash Snow’s death, will prices for his artwork zoom? In the art world, it’s called “the ghoul factor,” the phenomenon by which prices of a dead artist’s work take off because of financial speculation, the cutoff in supply, and, often, a posthumous canonization (already well under way in Snow’s case). Before Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, no Warhol had sold for more than $1 million; five years later, nearly two dozen had. “Works by artists who are deceased or no longer producing can be better investments,” says Constanze Kubern, senior art advisor of Castlestone Management, which started an art-investment fund in May. She declines to say whether Castlestone will go Snow shopping as a result, but there are a host of collectors and museums who wouldn’t consider an artist until he’s passed away, and Snow’s untimely death, like Warhol’s, puts the LES media star on their radar.

Dash Snow is dead, and all I can think about is that there will be more people at his first postmortem art auction than there will be at his funeral.