INTERVIEW BY DAVID BOGNERVice: Hi Ben. We really like the cat motif you have going in these drawings.Ben Ross:To tell you the truth, it’s never really been my intention to draw cats. It just happened. Maybe I watched too many cartoons when I was young. Disney, Kricfalusi, and Avery were the ones I liked best.How many cat drawings have you done?I did about 100 illustrations in this style over the course of three days.Do you like any other animals?Yeah, dogs. But I only use them for perverted drawings. The cats are the cool ones.Do you base your cat dudes on any real people? Some of them kind of look like Daft Punk fans or something.Well, actually Mark the Cobrasnake influenced me.Oh, um… Hmm… Well, uh… Do you really like his website?Maybe it’s not even important if I like it or not. I think it’s a phenomenon that didn’t exist ten years ago. This is the subculture, which is omnipresent. I think Cobrasnake is a good symbol of our generation.Geez, I, uh…It touches all of us basically. It’s an end in itself—capitalism devoured the youth culture, and Mark documents this. He reduces it to a common denominator.So you’re doing a political critique of the party kids on Cobrasnake. Are you making fun of them? The drawings seem to be kind of hateful.These kids are the new Nazis. But I’m not making fun of them, I just reflect on what I see without defining my position on it.What do you do besides drawing?Marcel Duchamp used to play chess. That’s all he did when he wasn’t making art. He decided to lift chess to an art form. So I am watching porn. And when I’m watching, it’s art. The internet is the new chessboard.Oh boy. You don’t get out a lot, do you?No. Actually I am too lazy for partying myself.
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