I find this extremely interesting and I’m grateful for your critical feedback. However, predictably, I disagree.

I think you place far too much emphasis on transformation being a necessary step in the production of art. Duchamp’s Fountain is essentially untransformed, and his In Advance of the Broken Arm and Bottle Rack are wholly untransformed. Nonetheless, these are cornerstones of contemporary art, and of Prince’s work specifically. I think you also undervalue the transformative step of Prince printing out the images on canvas. That’s a very different beast from a digital image in a scroll—one that can be deleted, appended with more text, hidden, placed in various contexts with juxtapositions from other feeds and ads.

I am hesitantly supportive of your identification of a tu quoque fallacy. I think I have some rebuttal, but I’m having trouble pinning it down. I may have nothing.

I would certainly say that just because a viewer calls this a problem (especially when they conflate moral or ethical and legal problems) doesn’t mean that Prince’s appropriation is a problem. And I think that their hypocritical tolerance of this kind of appropriation on their own part, while perhaps not providing a defense for Prince, does seem to me to lead to the logical inference that it’s not as harmful as they claim. Or that the accusations of the “harm” is more a vocalization of disparities in wealth and contemporary art as a shared and accessible cultural object than anything else, which concerns are extra-aesthetic.

You’re right, Instagram making money off of users’ posts doesn’t give Prince the right to reproduction. However, it is contrary to the blanket statements that no one should be profiting off of the work of the posters.

Along with the issue of transformation, my most strenuous disagreement is with the claim that Prince is depriving users of income. First, again, they may still print and sell their images. Second, many of his subjects are celebrities who already profit from their own likenesses. Third, although the economic disparity between Prince and most other artists is horrific and deeply problematic, that’s not his fault. He has very little control over whether his art can be valued at $100,000. This move, printing out Instagram posts, was inevitable in contemporary art, and someone may have even preceded Prince. However, he’s an established artist, and Gagosian is a preeminent gallery. Together they can get $100,000 per. Obviously that hasn’t deprived the Suicide Girls from charging money, and they could probably have charged more. It doesn’t prevent any of his other subjects from selling their images or likenesses on the open market. And that many of his subjects are not so valuable is not his fault either. That disparity and those different markets (Gagosian vs. Clic Gallery or whoever) is not Prince’s fault and is not an argument against his propriety in making this work. These are different markets and are not competitive or exclusionary. It’s true that most of these people would not be able to obtain $100,000 per image, but they can obtain some price. (Prince couldn’t always get that much money. It’s not an instantaneous thing.) They currently chose to also offer their work for free in an altered form on Instagram. But that doesn’t mean they can’t seek to sell their work.

Finally, the original poster is also here credited. Their name is featured prominently. Instagram does not dissuade people from posting copied, unattributed content.

A friend brought another, and I think more powerful, criticism to me: the image of Brooke Shields in Prince’s Spiritual America is an image created, essentially, without the consent of a child, and now repeated without the consent of the original photographer or the subject. Although the original image is probably very difficult to find at this point, I saw a print of Prince’s reproduction in the Whitney recently. There seems to be something like harm to the subject who has had control of their likeness removed so publicly. This has nothing to do with money or copying per se. I think it’s much more specific. It’s similar to revenge porn or embarrassing photos shared publicly. And I think his freezing of the conversation with his comments adds to this. This, it seems to me, is a legitimate ethical issue in his work. The money, I think, is irrelevant, as is appropriation and alteration. It’s much more intangible and difficult to deal with if we also stipulate that free speech and the boundaries of artistic production are as broad and free as they seem on paper.

Dillon makes a tu quoque fallacy when he dismisses the
public’s critique that Prince should not be appropriating work by arguing that
most people appropriate images in their everyday lives. Just because people may
appropriate ideas and photos themselves does not mean that they cannot identify
it as a problem in someone else’s work. The difference that the average person
does not sell their appropriated work for $100,000.

Dillon also claims that it is acceptable for Prince to use
selfies from Instagram based on the logic that Instagram is already “making money with targeted advertising, leveraging
user data and attention for product placement.” The fact Instagram makes money
off of data from its own users does not give Prince the right to rip off of the
selfies of Instagram users. Instagram users agree to Instagram’s use of their
data in exchange for using their platform, while Prince is simply taking their
images to make money for himself.

Dillon also argues that the
selfies that Prince is using do not count as the original image because he
includes the Instagram layout as well as incorporating the comments of other
users. However, this is actually even more appropriation because not only is he
taking the user’s photo, but also Instagram’s layout and the words of other
users. He is technically stealing from more people, and he is not creating
anything original because he still doesn’t not make any structural changes to
the design. Dillon makes a good point when he says that we can discern the
actual print from the photograph on the phone because they are in such
different forms, the image is still the same. Changing the format of the image
does not drastically alter the image itself enough to consider it as
“transformed.”

Dillon also mentions that
Prince is not depriving the people in the photos of any income to justify the
profit that the artist makes. Yet these users would most likely accept income
if they could get it. Unfortunately, they are not famous artists, so they do
not have the opportunity to get paid for the images that they produce. The fact
that they are unable to acquire currency for their photos does not mean that
Prince gets to take them and profit off of them. In rare cases, the users are
able to profit off of the prints that Prince creates, as described in Hannah
James Parkinson’s article “Instagram, an Artist and the $100,000 Selfies
– Appropriation in the Digital Age.” However, when
the SuicideGirls made money selling prints appropriated from the photos that
Prince appropriated from their Instagram, they did so because they were lashing
out as a response to feeling like Prince had committed a “violation.” They were
angry that he had used their images without permission, and shocked that people
would pay so much for them.

Finally, Dillon compares Prince’s methods of appropriation to
a retweet, yet the entire concept is completely different. With a retweet, you
put another person’s words as well as their username onto your own account,
clearly labelled as someone else’s idea, then you can comment on it, but your
comments appear as a separate entity on top of the retweet to separate the
voices. Even if this retweet is retweeted by other people, the original user is
still preserved and credited. Tweets are also meant to be shared and reposted.
Prince, on the other hand, takes a personal image without permission and alters
the comments on the image, changing the meaning of the portrait. Then he sells
the image and profits thousands of dollars, making it a profitable act rather
than one of sharing for him.

Who ever said anything about interesting? Who said his work is a matter of questions solely of authorship? Who said anything about intentional shock? I’m annoyed by people doing things all the time, often things that don’t earn them any money and may cost them a lot, so I don’t buy your claim that “it pays to piss people off.” It pays to have a brand and a big gallery, and sometimes a gimmick, too. And, as you can tell by the essay, I don’t see any evidence that Cariou’s career has been “pissed on,” whatever that means.