An Hour With… Dan Rosen

In the same way that I am bound to read a novel written by a critic with unfair pre-emptive scrutiny, I was bound to enter Dan Rosen’s New York apartment with more of an appetite for identifying unappealing decor than I ordinarily would visiting a stranger’s home. Rosen is a comedian and cartoonist, but he has recently come to public prominence on social media for sharing amusing critiques of celebrity homes. His videos, which are routinely watched millions of times, analyse rote design decisions that combine to create visions of neutrality and minimalism so tasteful they make you nauseous. The gargantuan sums of money spent to create these scenes are part of the critique: the excess, the impersonality, the hubris.

“What are you hoping to show with this home?” Rosen asked of Alec Baldwin’s plain Hamptons five-bedroom. “This is a mayonnaise bathroom. What was on the mood board? A set of veneers?” (Baldwin responded, rather perfunctorily: “Why don’t you go away?”)

Later, while reviewing the home once shared by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Rosen said, “You want a home that you can live in, not one that’s made to be in a design magazine,” before highlighting the unwieldy gap between a chair and its corresponding coffee table. “Look at the distance… What, are you gonna do the splits to get your coffee?”

Rosen grew up in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, one of six children. He began doing standup while studying at Cornell University, but committed only after graduation, when he began hitting open-mic nights around the city. “I got to know New York very well,” he says now. “But they were the saddest, most decrepit bars. It’s comics performing for other comics. And as soon as people have finished their own sets, they leave.”

For a while, Rosen made amusing videos for outlets, including the New Yorker and Funny Or Die, an independent studio in LA. When TikTok became the world’s pre-eminent short-form video platform, he was well placed to take advantage. Covid had hit, and “all those Architectural Digest home tour videos” – reams of celebrities faux-welcoming viewers into their pristine houses – “were blowing up”. Rosen recalls “everyone having this intense renewed interest in their own homes”. Fertile video territory.

When the algorithm began to spew out ever more celebrity interiors, Rosen was struck by how lifeless and forced they often seemed. “So much of it was wealth porn,” he says. “Very tasteless, lacking in any personal relationship to the surroundings. It was like an alien spaceship had landed and put a celebrity in a place they didn’t actually live.” (See: West and Kardashian’s home.) “I felt like propaganda was being pushed, and I didn’t see much criticism, and definitely not any comedy about it.” Rosen had become very good at writing jokes about pretty much anything. “And I thought, there’s a way to make an accessible but more refined aesthetic critique. If I brought in broad comedy references, that might bring people in.”

When Rosen speaks about interiors, he is also often discussing fine art. One of his most popular videos is a list of “Artists rich people with bad taste love”. (The list includes Damien Hirst, Banksy, Kaws and Renoir, if you’re interested). We discuss how art has become not just a canny investment for the rich and famous but a flex, too. Kanye West raps about owning George Condos, Jay Z about Basquiats. Rosen says it saddens him that art has been commodified, like any other consumer product. “To me it’s not the same as having fur coats or going to Nobu, and it ultimately leads to the NFT situation, which is that line of thought taken to its fullest expression, where the content is totally irrelevant.”

The infamously awkward segment on The Tonight Show in which Jimmy Fallon shills an ape NFT is, Rosen says, what should be put in a time capsule to indict late capitalism. What drives his critiques is not simply to be funny and rude about a celebrity’s home to highlight its crassness. Instead it’s to propagate an idea he feels deeply: that learning to appreciate art and design, and to consider it consciously in our own surroundings, enriches our lives. Being glibly wowed by conspicuous consumption, conversely, does not.

Here our discussion leads to Rosen’s own home, where he has lived for years, and which he says has been improved by the arrival of his wife, who has great taste and a green thumb. I might, my editor suggested before I went, have my own critique to make of it. Luckily for Rosen, not only do I have the visual sophistication of a pre-depth-perception infant, but actually his apartment is very nice, in a relaxed, lightly cluttered way familiar to me from my own apartment and those of most of my friends – albeit with a much nicer coffee table and better lamps.

“People are always, like, lets fucking see your home,” he laughs. “But I am not worth $50m. I promise. I have popcorn ceilings.”

He does. But he also has particular carefully chosen objects he is obviously especially fond of.

“I can collect a little at a time,” he says. “Like, that Exit sign is by this group 6AM, which is an Italian glass manufacturer I love. The way that people spend $20 on a smoothie and feel like they’re rich, I can have some of the things I love.”

Most of Rosen’s critiques centre on the impersonal minimalism common to many celebrity homes. I ask if he is hoping to promote a particular aesthetic.

“It’s less pushing what I like and more about asking people to consider what these taste signifiers are meant to indicate, and how people are using art and culture to signal certain things. I want people to think more critically of what they’re seeing, and not immediately assume that something is de facto good because it’s being shown to them and has a stamp of approval by Architectural Digest or a celebrity art collector or the New York Times.”

He pauses, shrugs. “Or by me, or whoever.”

@thedanrosen