Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash has fallen from grace and reinvented himself as the host of a Tribeca salon where artists and artsy people do artistic things and smoke weed. Does that mean he's the new Andy Warhol?
The Observer reports that after falling out with Jay-Z, leaving Roc-A-Fella, and losing his marriage, his fortune, and his homes, Dash has turned a four-story warehouse at 172 Duane Street into a creative center that might be his generation's answer to Warhol's Factory. Rapper and actor Mos Def described the space, dubbed DD172, as "a cross between early Hitsville, Andy Warhol's Factory and a little bit of the Algonquin roundtable. But it's something completely different."
Regulars say the arts hangout allows them to escape from the outside world — which Dash describes as "wack world." "Everything is wack world out there," said Dash. "Every corporate infrastructure — it's like we're a bunch of circles trying to fit in square pegs, and it doesn't work. And that's what everyone here feels. Like, I don't fit in that world. Because the way it's built, only a certain amount of people will win, and everyone else will lose and get exploited." So the self-described "pretentious hippie" established a business model in which he's a 50 percent partner in anything created inside DD172, whether it's the first-floor gallery, the online-content-production company Creative Control, the planned culture magazine America Knew, or the web-design firm VNGRD79. "Look, you don't come out of financial troubles over night," he said. "But, I guess, if this is financial trouble, I like being broke."
