Threadworms, From the Archives: Philippa Snow
Art from out my ass
When I went to art school in the noughties, I learned two things very quickly—the first thing was that I was not particularly good at making art, and the second thing was that I had a knack for bullshitting. What I mean by “bullshitting” is actually “art criticism,” which is to say: ascribing meaning to an object or an image by successfully pulling an idea out of my ass, usually while hungover and invariably on the fly. If you also went to art school, I presume your experience of it was in some ways similar to mine; if you didn’t, all you really need to understand is that a big part of the curriculum is, or was then, presenting your work and having other students tell you what they think it is about, as well as the various ways in which they find it pointless or offensive. Because everyone is very young and green and given to pretension, there are no bad ideas in a critique of this kind, and because your tutors grade you on participation, it behoves you to speak up and say the first thing on your mind. I presume that I said many stupid things about, if I am honest, many stupid artworks during those three years, especially given that I once shared a tutorial group with a student who had based his entire practice around photographing his ejaculate on traditionally “British” objects, up to and including—hauntingly; indelibly—a full roast dinner. What stayed with me after graduation though, once I had given up on the act of making art itself, was an enduring impulse to dissect the things I read, or watched, or saw in galleries, as if each time I were dismantling a watch and trying to figure out what made it keep the time.
I once shared a tutorial group with a student who had based his entire practice around photographing his ejaculate on traditionally “British” objects, up to and including—hauntingly; indelibly—a full roast dinner.
Eventually, it occurred to me that this deep-rooted compulsion could be applied to cultural objects that did not present themselves as art at all, and that furthermore sometimes the meaning that could be extracted from those things was more compelling than the meaning I felt able to extract from intentionally ‘serious’ work. When I released an essay book about self-injury in art and entertainment late last year, because I’d written about nominally trashy television and about YouTube performers just as much as I had written about Chris Burden and Ron Athey, I found myself being asked over and over again what I thought made something art—a question many people infinitely smarter than myself have had a difficult time answering more or less since we began to call things ‘art’ at all. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have a definitive answer, but I do think there is something in that desire to vivisect: that an object or an image can be worth analysing as if it is a work of art if it provokes a tellingly intense response, or if it helps to elucidate or otherwise illuminate some facet of our experience of living in the world. I do not have a background in art history; I do not know an enormous amount about the history of criticism as a literary or art form, and I would not know how to begin writing in the horrible, obfuscating language often described as “International Art English.” To my mind, this is not necessarily a deal-breaker for a critic, since most people tend to engage with both fine art and pop culture not through the precise and sometimes alienating scrim of academic theory, but in much the same way they do with the wider world around them: instinctively and emotionally; ideally empathetically; occasionally with some bewilderment, but ultimately with good sense and curiosity and, hopefully, an open heart and mind.
valuable criticism can be drawn from almost anything, provided that transference of emotional energy—the “infection” of the audience by the artist’s feelings, even if what they are feeling is terrible pain.
It makes little sense to me, in other words, to have an art form—and I do consider criticism an art form, even though I would not dare to call myself a genuine artist—which exists to explain what might otherwise be difficult or inaccessible be in itself both difficult and inaccessible. As it happens, I do have a favourite definition of art, written by an actual genius, and it is this definition I invariably fall back on. “Art,” Leo Tolstoy argues in his 1987 essay What Is Art?, “is a human activity consisting in this: that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” I am thrilled by the idea that art is less a medium for creativity than a kind of communicable disease: that artists, who by reputation are extreme characters and inveterate risk-takers, are capable of enacting a Cronenbergian exchange of sensation with their audience. I am moved, however, by Tolstoy’s insistent focus on emotion—his suggestion that art’s purpose is the transfer of pure feeling, agony and ecstasy and love and grief and pain all ultimately taking precedence over art history and composition and theory and anything that can be gatekept.
I found myself being asked over and over again what I thought made something art—a question many people infinitely smarter than myself have had a difficult time answering more or less since we began to call things ‘art’ at all.
Show anyone Picasso’s Guernica without providing any further contextualising information, and they will still recognise it as an agonised and agonising image, even if they do not know which war is being explicitly depicted: they will react to its obvious rendering of pain, its chaos and its bared teeth and its near-audible screaming, and its trampling horses and stampeding bull. With this in mind, why would the same audiences not experience a similarly intense emotional reaction to another piece of media defined by pain, chaos and bared teeth and endless screaming, and not one but several rampant bulls, one of whom is called Mr Mean? I am speaking, of course, about Jackass, the TV and movie franchise fronted by one Johnny Knoxville—arguably the Pablo Picasso of being kicked squarely in the nuts. That Knoxville became one of the key pillars of Which As You Know Means Violence, alongside ‘serious’ cultural figures like Bob Flanagan and Marina Abramovic, is proof of how much I believe in the idea that valuable criticism can be drawn from almost anything, provided that transference of emotional energy—the “infection” of the audience by the artist’s feelings, even if what they are feeling is terrible pain—is in play. Jackass is about stupidity and shit gags, yes—it is also about catharsis and male bonding, and one of the most interesting things about being associated with it via the book has been hearing how important the show was to so many viewers, regardless of gender or class or race or sexual orientation. It is right and fair that criticism should have evolved to address structural and societal inequalities, and to draw attention to inadequate or inaccurate representation; likewise, there will always be a place for texts that situate an object or a subject in the context of art history, or of history in general. I will always have a soft spot, though, for the kind of criticism that acts as a conduit for that Tolstoyan transfer—the critic behaving as a medium in a séance, giving themselves over to the channelling of sensations and ideas that, in turn, move them enough that it is as if they’re writing in a trance.
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist, based in Norfolk, England. Her work has appeared in publications including Bookforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Spike magazine, Tate Etc., ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, Texte Zur Kunst, The New Statesman, Artforum, The TLS and The New Republic.
She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.
Publications Which as You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022)
Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object (Mack, 2024)
Snow Business (Isolarii, 2025)
It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me: On Femininity and Fame
(Virago, 2025)
