Philippa Snow: Snow Business

A collection of her most celebrated early writings, Snow Business marks Philippa Snow’s emergence as one of the twenty-first century’s greatest cultural critics.

From the 2000s into the 2010s, ‘second-screen media’, designed to play in the background while we look at phones, has proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.

Snow is a ruthless decoder, sifting through the lows (celeb tell-alls, L.A. advertisements masked as entertainments) and the highs (David Lynch’s The Return; Francis Bacon’s paintings), and articulating with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between popular culture and art.