“So the other day, I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Slate’s editors were, ‘ironically, unable to get permission’ to reproduce Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 for Sarah Boxer’s slideshow review of ‘Into The Sunset,’ MoMA’s exhibition of photography’s role in creating the concept of the American West. [The irony, of course, is that Prince’s work is actually a rephotograph of a Marlboro Man ad, which was probably photographed originally by Jim Krantz.] And so I blithely grabbed an image of Untitled (Cowboy) online, resized and retitled it, and republished it as my own work, 300 x 404, After Untitled (Cowboy) 2003 by Richard Prince, and offered to let Slate show it instead. Though I’ve written for Slate before, they have not, as yet, taken me up on my offer.” - greg.org; also see the follow-up post.
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Concerning the discussion about Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster (did he or did he not plagiarize earlier work and/or did he violate somebody else’s copyright): The chickens are clearly coming home to roost. After all, we are still missing meaningful discussions about how new art can relate to earlier art (and by that I do not mean rants about somebody “ripping off” somebody else or rants about how artists can do anything they want), we are still missing meaningful discussions about art and money (if an “underground” artist suddenly can make some money is that so bad - is s/he “selling out”?), and we have allowed people to pretty much reduce the issue of copyright to purely commercial aspects (with corporations, most famously Disney, at the forefront of how copyright should be defined).
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“Paris photographer Patrick Cariou has filed suit against Richard Prince, Gagosian [the man and the gallery], and Rizzoli for copyright infringement. Prince used photos from Cariou’s 2000 book Yes Rasta in the Canal Zone paintings he just showed at Gagosian NY last month” - story
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Richard Prince has a big show in London, and the critics are not amused (plus this review, the logic of which in part escapes me).
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I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, because I think there is something to be learned from looking at a topic from as many angles as possible. Richard Prince recently gained further notoriety when one of the photographs from his Cowboys series sold for 3.4 million US$. These Cowboys, of course, are photographs of other photographs, namely of sections of Marlboro cigarette ads, and that’s where - according to many people - the problem is to be found: Not only is it quite shameless to take a photo of someone else’s work and then pretend it’s one’s own, but it’s even more shameless to sell it for 3.4 million dollars.
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“Young artists may dream of being Richard Prince, but the 58-year-old former Time Inc. staffer spent years in obscurity before his ‘joke’ paintings, re-photographed Marlboro Man ads, and muscle-car sculptures began to fetch record-breaking prices.” - story Update (6 Dec): And then there is this article about the photographer who took the original cigarette ad photos.
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Around this past Christmas, the Boston Globe featured a story about ailing veterans (bug me not) on its front page, and I found the image they used quite remarkable. Unfortunately, the version online is a bit small, and in print, the colours looked somewhat different, too. In print, the room has a reddish glow from the lights inside the room, and both the TV and the open door are brightly offset from that. The interesting thing about the image - at least for me - is that it is a confluence of individual images, with the veteran in his wheelchair, whose pose and obvious suffering strikingly resemble those seen in classic religious paintings, in the center, and left and right, almost like panels used in the past, you see a decorated Christmas tree, whose colourful cheerfulness feels out of place, and a TV showing an still that uncannily evokes the images produced by Richard Prince from cigarette ads (like, for example, this one). I couldn’t stop staring at the photo.
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