8. Dash Snow – Destroying Hotel Rooms To Make Nests
He was heir to one of America’s greatest family fortunes and a multimillion-dollar art collection. But Dash Snow rebelled to become a self-styled outsider, a penniless “downtown Baudelaire” obsessed with drugs, sex and self-destruction. Art collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi put the artist up in a posh Piccadilly hotel along with his friend and fellow New Yorker Dan Colen. The pair decided to make a “hamster nest” within their hotel room – shredding 50 phone books, blankets and curtains for “bedding” in which to curl up and take a cocktail of drugs. The experiment ended with them evacuating the hotel room in the middle of the night to escape arrest. Eventually, the all-night parties, the drugs, the sexual adventurism grew too dark for the artist, Snow’s death from an overdose was not altogether unexpected.