January 17 to February 25, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 77th and 78th streets
New York City, gagosian.com

The exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian uptown is remarkable both for the quality of the paintings and for the way they embody the transformational moment in which they were made. The 17 paintings filling a single large room are all from 1974-75 and if they are metronomic in their structure and in their presentation, their urgency and excitement are as palpable as when they were first presented. Together with a catalogue by the show’s curators, Katy Siegel and Christopher Wool, that delves into the mid-70s context of Reed’s paintings, this show creates a vivid historical context for the works that commence Reed’s distinguished career.

Painting Paintings reunites many paintings that were shown in Reed’s heady debut at Susan Caldwell gallery in 1975. Reviewing it that year for Art in America, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Reed’s paintings have “the strength of modesty, of ambition reduced to a level not further reducible. There is no ‘getting around’ these paintings”.

Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas panels are less than a foot wide and about six feet vertically—wider paintings consist of these regular units bolted together. But it is the process that makes these paintings standout. The paintings are the result of Reed pulling a large loaded brush of red or black paint through a thick wet ground of whitish oil paint. What follows from this premise are viscerally compelling incidents where the brushstrokes have dissolved into viscous skeins of paint. Although the gesture of Reed’s brushstroke is simple and repetitive, pigment and gravity collaborate to form detailed arrays of micro-cosmic composition—each is a unique painterly moment, off hand and delectable at the same time.

There is a specific bodily relation to Reed’s paintings that is crucial and cannot be reproduced.  The bands of brushstrokes can be apprehended through photography but in terms of the physical experience of looking at these paintings, the stripes do only perfunctory duty. Rather than function as the paintings’ compositional goal the alternating bands are the structure that allows paint to hang in an intimate choreography of splashes and blendings.  In the catalogue Siegel and Wool note that the linear compositions are like writing with their left to right pulls of pigment. They also bear a resemblence to a musical score. Additionally, the quality of Reed’s paintings relate to the sumptuous and insistently rhythmic compositions that Philip Glass and Steve Reich were performing in lower Manhattan in the mid-seventies. The vertical panel has an ergonomic architecture tuned for a human body to paint its surface. The clarity of each painting’s facture reminds us that as viewers we take up the same location in front of the canvas as the artist did while painting it. The paintings invite us to step in close to see and soak up lush surface specifics.  It is this pull to intimacy that gives Reed’s paintings their humanity and warmth. And that seems to be where the picture is in these works— not in their imagistic configuration but within the physical process of close looking.

Through contemporaneous documents—magazine and catalogue pages, installation and personal photographs, as well as reproductions of works by other artists—the catalogue presents the personal as well as cultural context for Reed’s emergence as a painter. There is an evocative photograph from 1968, for instance, of Reed in attendance at the New York Studio School with the painters Philip Guston and Leland Bell surrounded by students. Although Reed moved on from the conservative spatialist conventions of that institution, the catalogue presents his development less as a rejection as the taking up of a radical rethinking of art underway at that time in New York. The catalogue includes a chapter based on the exhibition, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, curated by James Monte and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1969 that manifested the concerns of process-oriented artists of the late 1960s. The show included only one painter, Robert Ryman, and as such might have been called “Anti-Painting”. Most of the artists selected were less interested in the history of painting and sculpture than in science, technology, and sociology. Even so, these “Anti-Illusion” artists employ a number of shared pictorial conventions. Foremost is the use of repetition. Partly this is an affection for rhythm, but it is also a control to discover how different effects come from the same action. Additionally repetition is used to present narrative in a manner like film through a sequence of frames. Finally, there is a taste for documentation as representation—either through the technical means of photography, film or video, or through the presentation of material residue as evidence of the action that produced it. As indicated by the use of the word in the 1969 show title, Material, material, raw and unadorned, is savored in the work of artists such as Lynda Benglis and Carl Andre. It was an insightful choice by Siegel and Wool to include these contemporary works in Reed’s catalogue because it demonstrates how he embraced pictorial values of the zeitgeist. It is an achievement, and an unlikely one, that Reed brought what were often thought to be anti-painting values to his painting so naturally.

One flight down at Gagosian, the curators installed a group of works tangentially related to Reed’s paintings, including examples of Joel Shapiro, Wool himself, Joyce Pensato (a classmate at the Studio School) and Andy Warhol. While such efforts at building context work well in the catalogue, in the gallery the group show seemed more convenient than urgent. In comparison to the focus embodied in Reed’s paintings the group show was at best a pleasant distraction to Reed’s prodigious accomplishment.

As the catalogue emphasizes, Reed spent years painting from life, practicing drawing, and listening to accomplished artists speak about painting. Writings by Reed reveal his love for historical painting; his notes about color and the location of shapes within his compositions show a lineage of academic discipline. Cearly, Reed’s education in traditional painting and drawing have been a resource over the years. Although the works in the “Anti-Illusion” catalogue have a great absurdist exhuberence I couldn’t help but think how evanescent are those works that rely on document and trace rather than engaging the more traditional forms of painting and sculpture. The Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock in the midst of painting is iconic but it’s the painting that remains to give the photograph its consequence. Inversely, with Richard Serra casting lead against the corner of a wall and floor (also reproduced in the catalogue) it is the photographs that remain to signify the artist and his gesture. In this case it is Serra’s persona, or you could say stunt, that is the primary artwork. For Reed, the painting itself is the primary document. As the title suggests, Reed’s subject is Painting, not his body’s gestures. It was ambitious for Reed to take on the then contemporary pictorial conventions of repetition, documentation as representation, and material immance. As for the accomplishment of these paintings—there is still no ‘getting around’ that.

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The way public discourse and policy are staged may seem ancillary to the actual processes of state and business, but are much more vital than one might assume, serving as a metaphor for the way that the true effect of a pact can be overlooked when focusing on flowery, triumphant assertions. Subtle signals of ostentation, power, and homeliness or populism are often on display in photo ops for the signing of contracts, declarations, treaties. Taryn Simon throws an unfocused but beautiful spotlight on these semiotics in her current solo, “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location. Simon pairs brief summaries of political and commercial agreements with still-life recreations of the flowers present at the press events used to publicly seal such deals. Also included are pressed samples of the flora and lists of their binomens. Barnett Newman once said that “Aesthetics is for artists what Ornithology is for birds.” One might similarly wonder if decorous displays of authority are to politics what flower arrangements are to botanists.

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February 18 to March 26, 2016
555 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 741 1111

Throughout much of her artistic career, Taryn Simon has utilized the power of visual media — including photography, sculpture, video, and performance — to critique systems of power. Her work exposes the dark side of existing practices and, in particular, the ways in which law affects the lives of people. Simon exploits the dual record-keeping and fiction-making role of photography to document and fabricate the invisible. For example, in The Innocents series (2003), the artist shames the flawed American criminal justice system by photographing wrongfully convicted men at the sites of their alleged crimes. Such works reveal the inadequacies or, more often, harms that result from the current systems in place. Her works compel the question: whom are these laws meant to serve?

Simon’s work answers that the law is meant to serve its people, but the practical applications of law often do not reflect this purpose. Law exists to maintain order that will facilitate a free society in which people can pursue happiness without impinging upon the pursuits of others. However, law is often used against the very people it was meant to serve and protect.

If Simon’s previous work exposed the perverse applications of law, her most recent body of works on display at Gagosian Gallery reveals another side of law: its empty and symbolic nature. Part humor, part lament, we often joke that politicians are full of crap. Unfortunately, the statement is funny because it is often true. Simon’s photographs and sculptures highlight the artificiality and hopelessly symbolic nature of international treaties: perhaps some of the emptiest promises by one group of politicians to another.

The 36 large-scale photographs depict recreated floral centerpieces that had ornamented press events announcing an international treaty or decree. Each photograph is accompanied by a description and the fates of the international agreements the flowers were meant to commemorate. Most agreements influenced systems of governance or economics, such as the Convention of Cluster Munitions in 2008, where 91 nations and the Holy See agreed to ban the use of cluster bombs, which continue to be used by countries today, including the United States. Simon framed the photographs and their descriptions in a rich mahogany, as though the works could be part of the very boardrooms at which these agreements took place. 12 sculptures in the center of the room consist of pressed flowers, specimens of the 36 centerpieces, sewn onto paper, that sit above or between tall concrete flower presses — the heavy masses bear their weight into the floor with the gravity of solemn monuments.

The power of these works — the large photographs in particular — stems from captivating images that, despite their startling vividness, remain harmless to the viewer.

We use flowers as harmless speech. We buy flowers most often as symbolic gestures to commemorate an occasion or to express particular sentiments to others. We use flowers as harmless objects of contemplation, to provide visual reminders of such sentiments and occasions.

Such speech-flowers are fragile and ephemeral. Their visual and olfactory pleasures expire as quickly as the feelings of the occasion begin to fade from our memories. When they lose their value as sensory pleasure-givers, we toss them out. Unlike other symbolic gifts, we readily dispose of flowers because of their purpose as temporary symbols. The other side of this sad fate of flowers as symbols is that if one does not wish their flowers to meet their inevitable destiny in the trash, one must prematurely remove them from their life-extending environments in water and place them between the pages of a book — or a flower-press, as Simon has — and crush them live in the name of preservation.

Simon highlights the utterly symbolic and superficial role of flowers — and the occasions they were to commemorate — by exaggerating the surface beauty of flowers that were once sitting on the tables where international powers signed various agreements. Most of the photographs show exquisite arrangements in intensely vivid colors, all against equally striking and beautifully color-blocked backgrounds. However, the texts accompanying the mesmerizing centerpieces state the common fate of all these treaties: failure of the signatories to implement them.

The artist thereby disturbs the easy assumptions held by many people: that once codified into law, the harms addressed by the law will remedy themselves. Her beautiful photos and their accompanying texts expose this as a faulty assumption, which presumes the automatic integration of such agreements into real life. However, laws do not execute themselves — people do.

First, many international treaties are not self-executing; local governments must pass laws that allow their execution. Even after the agreements are passed as local laws, law truly exists — and therefore holds power — only when it is enforced in everyday life. Without enforcement, these international agreements remain as mere words on paper, nice and fanciful ideas, and nice gestures by participating governments, yet nothing more.

The horror bestowed upon us by Simon’s beautiful work stems from the realization that this is actually how legal systems in general work, and that substantial harm can result from the nature of law as a multi-step process. A law may be passed because of a felt need to address existing problems, but the law can only fulfill its initial purpose when it is executed properly in everyday life, down to the policemen, government agencies, and the judiciary.

Today, when instances of misapplication and faulty enforcement of the law continue to demonstrate the shortcomings of the current system, Simon’s recent work prompts a second look at law as “mere words,” and invites us to emancipate it from its purely symbolic status toward a working system that better serves its true master: the people.

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The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I travel there every few years and typically end up in the area during summer, missing the rain for which it’s infamous. This year I visited Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, seeing a lot of the gallery and museum scene. The Seattle Art Fair ran during the start of August. It’s mostly a small-ish regional fair, though there were booths by Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, Zürcher, James Cohan, and other New Yorkers. I skipped it though, having a kind of snooty distaste for those conventions. I mean, who in their right mind would want to attend an art fair? Oof.

So I went straight for the regional institutions. There’s a lot to see. First: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. It’s set in the city’s hip and young U district, and it’s a smartly designed, well organized space. They show emerging and established artists in a variety of media. They do not have a large space, so there aren’t clusters of galleries with an expansive selection from their permanent collection. Instead, they have well-curated exhibitions and I had just missed the school’s MFA exhibition, which runs for a month, rather than the week that many New York students get.

On view while I was there was, among other things, Martin Creed’s Work No. 360: About half the air in a given space (2015), which was comprised of a large gallery filled almost to capacity by silver balloons. Visitors could enter through one of two doorways and push their way through the claustrophobic mass, being disoriented and kind of pleasantly bewildered by the balloons’ power to constrict and delight. Also on view: a handsome retrospective for photographer Ilse Bing, a show of un-stretched and shaped canvases by Allan McCollum and Karen Carson, and a solo show by Michelle Handelman, with video and photography conflating vampirism, psychotherapy, and class-and-queer antagonism. The video draws from a Silent-Film-era series about Parisian thieves, called The Vampires, so one can forgive Handelman’s melodrama. It’s richly textured in a fetishistic way, and the accompanying photographs are exciting.

A few days later I took the train down to Portland, where I met up with artcritical contributor, publishing magnate, and poet extraordinaire Paul Maziar, and his friends, who showed me the nightlife — great host and hostesses. We remarked on the aesthetic qualities in the bright redness of neon lights adorning one of the construction cranes which has been expanding the city of late. Maziar’s been consuming Marcel Duchamp, so we say, “Sure, why not? Call it industrial-scale readymade sculpture.”

Next morning I left my kind hosts and took a long walk into downtown of the beautiful city, finishing up at the Portland Art Museum. The institution is currently hosting Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold (2010), which is displayed among the museum’s many galleries of Asian art and artifacts. The suite of 12 animal heads represents the Chinese calendrical zodiac, and is based on a sculpture formerly of an imperial garden outside Beijing, designed by Europeans, used by the Chinese elite, then looted by French soldiers in 1860. The scale and craftsmanship of Weiwei’s sculpture is spectacular, however, despite the didactics, I got the sense that I was missing something pretty fundamental about the subtleties of the artist’s choice of representation. Is it something about the Chinese government’s complicated relationship to Weiwei, to the nation’s own history, and the waves of European colonization and Chinese reclamation in these images? I can’t tell.

The aforementioned Asian art and artifacts galleries are really top rate. The layout of the building is labyrinthine, which can vary the experience between excited discovery and a confused, lost feeling.

Another exhibition, “Gods and Heroes: Masterpieces from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris,” collects more than 140 paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the school, from between the 15th and 19th centuries. I can have a hard time with some of the flowery, academic work that the institution produced and inspired, but it’s hard to argue with some of the works on view in this show. Albrecht Dürer’s The Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (ca. 1498), kind of made my jaw drop a little. And PAM also has a great selection of Modern and contemporary work, including a selection, on view now, of reductivist work by Robert Mangold, Dorothea Rockburne, Judy Chicago, John McCracken, and others — stuff that really gets me going. And there’s a large display of photographs, which the museum calls a “Fotofolio,” by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, and Edward and Brett Weston and Minor White. Their silver gelatin prints of the American West made me wish to flee New York and find an abandoned mission on top of a mountain.

Also there, now closed, was a show of David Hockney’s print suite, A Rake’s Progress (1975), along with a set of prints by William Hogarth, made in 1733, on which Hockney’s sequence is based.

Full from Portland, I went back to Seattle. I took a breather and went to the Seattle Art Museum, at which the main attraction is currently “Disguise: Masks and Global African Currents,” which was a kind of unremarkable show about artists using the imagery of African masks in their work. The hanging was gimmicky and impoverished, and several of the artists felt slight and arbitrary (no Keith Sonnier?). But, next to it was a great, like, really out of sight display of actual African masks, along with archival footage of performers at a carnival in the Côte d’Ivoire. That stuff is way more exciting and intellectually engaging than much of the show’s contemporary work.

As well, a small but nonetheless excellent show, called “The Duchamp Effect,” rounded up post-War artists making use of Duchamp’s innovations. There was a lot of toilet humor and pointing at contradictions between image, language, and actuality. One very smart touch was the inclusion of a photograph by Louise Lawler, showing two artworks in a collector’s home. Lawler’s photograph shared gallery space with the two artworks it pictures: a painting by Jasper Johns and a sculpture by James Rosenquist.

I left Seattle’s piney metropolis for an excursion north, to Vancouver. Even Canada’s border is beautiful, with enormous gunnera unfurling at the edges of Peace Arch border-crossing park, and a sculpture by Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han — a billboard-like form of negative space overlooking the Pacific inlet there. A few minutes away, Vancouver is a really, really pretty city, seemingly compacted into the natural concavity of the Salish Sea’s coast. There are tall skyscrapers, the city is sparklingly clean, and I arrived immediately after Pride weekend, with festive banners and the debris of feather boas all over the place. I mean, it’s a really beautiful city. And in Canada, HBO has its own regional programming, including mandated indigenous programs and movies, which are very cool and sort of an entertaining (if small) gesture at reconciliation after hundreds of years of genocide and oppression. I liked the movie Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013). It’s good.

There, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is hosting an enormous retrospective of Canadian sculptor Geoffrey Farmer, “How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth?” I found myself thinking about Farmer’s tremendous archivist spirit, collecting and combining the pieces of National Geographic back issues, fiberglass sculptures, bits of signs, notes, tapes, vehicles, and all sorts of other things. It brought me back to a perpetual question in an era of explosive image production and distribution: is cataloguing and organizing one of the best strategies for an artist trying to cope, resist, or flow with such proliferation? I think probably yes. One small room held an archive of artist lectures and interviews on cassette tape, and invited visitors to sit and listen awhile.

On the ground floor was a great “show,” a display of works on paper from the museum’s collection, a trifle compared to the offerings that will be on view following the institution’s addition of a new space, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The works on paper, over a hundred on one large wall, were intended to entice viewers to see the benefits of the costly and overdue expansion. The next gallery over showed work from another collection in “Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums,” with a handsome selection of paintings covering a spectacular historical range, while still appearing intellectually clear and to the point. Upstairs was a group show in several spaces, each artist given their own gallery. Called “Residue: The Persistence of the Real,” this exhibition of documentary photography studies the way that history is retained in images, as in Catherine Opie’s beautiful shots of Liz Taylor’s home and Geoffrey James’s absolutely just mind-blowing shots of Canada’s infamous Kingston Penitentiary, where inmates decorated the walls of their cells so ornately they could be mistaken for contemporary installation art.

Down the street, the Bill Reid Gallery shares the history and importance of First Nations’ arts, with a permanent display of work by Reid, one of Canada’s most famous contemporary indigenous craftsmen. Likewise, the museum promotes the continuing traditions of local tribes, including live, free-form Q & A with an artist working in the atrium. Sean Whonnock was there when I visited, and he told me a lot about the construction of regional iconography, about the craftsmanship of these artworks, his own life, and the traditions of his family and tribe. There’s a lot of great indigenous art and craft all over, and most of these museums had great collections, sustaining cultures that were almost completely wiped out during the preceding centuries.

Finally, back in Seattle, I hit up the city’s monthly First Thursday art walk, down at historic Pioneer Square. The galleries are, in many ways, like those in New York and anywhere else in the world: there are some you’d like to spend a lot of time in, others not so much. One major difference is the organization of openings, all on the same Thursday, with plenty of white and red wines, food, and live music. Totally alien, right? The atmosphere is festive and people are out to enjoy the scene, rather than trying to make the scene. I was taken by Greg Kucera Gallery, which had a diverse collection of works on view by self-taught artists, including Gee’s Bend quilts, Henry Darger paintings, drawings by James Castle and Bill Traylor, and so on. In the back was a show by Gregory Blackstock, who is autistic and creates large mixed-media drawings cataloguing all kinds of incidentals: dictionary definitions, sheepshank knots, flags of the world, rottweiler breeds. Blackstock was in attendance and was more open in his discussing his work than any New York artist you’ve ever met.

The whole trip, whirlwind that it was, showed me some new favorite art spots on the left coast. If you’re in the area, you’d be foolish to pass them up.

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Richard Prince has recently attracted a fair amount of performative, high-decibel anger for his new work. In May, at the Frieze Fair, he showed several pieces from his Instagram series — unique pigment prints on canvas made from screenshots, taken by the artist, of other people’s pictures on the photo sharing app Instagram. They typically include a comment by Prince, typed in below the photo, as signature and alteration. Artcritical contributor Kurt Ralske wrote a really insightful essay about the work last fall, when it was shown at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. A new exhibition of the series opened at Gagosian’s Davies Street location in London on June 12. A show called “Original” closed at the Madison Avenue location on June 20. Similar to his earlier paintings, such as Nurses or his Eden Rock series, these are the covers of pulp novels — illustrators’ original cover art framed with the book for which it was produced. They’ve attracted far less scrutiny and heat than his Instagram images.

Both new series, and much of the rest of Prince’s oeuvre, use a similar operation. He takes preexisting material, without permission, and reproduces it with his name attached. He often changes very little (if any) of the original matter. That maneuver has a very long lineage, as many art admirers will recognize, in Prince’s career, his contemporaries, and in the generations that preceded him: Sherrie Levine, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, the codified iconography of various cultures — and etc.^[1] It can often be difficult to distinguish between convention, appropriation, plagiarism, and homage. Repetition, reproduction, iteration, also at play here, have similarly long genealogies in Lucas Cranach, the Dadaists, Warhol again, Louise Lawler, Robert Gober, and so many others. Those are obviously histories of which Prince’s detractors are either unaware, or that don’t carry weight.

In recent weeks, media outlets fleetingly percolated at the commotion around Prince, including not only the fine-arts press, but also FOX News, the BBC, Bloomberg, Wired, blogs, etc.[2] A flood of angry Instagram and Twitter users has periodically swamped the comment threads of Prince’s online accounts. Many (if not all) of those complaining about Prince’s work also routinely use repurposed, appropriated, or otherwise copied images. A vitriolic audience has discovered Prince exactly when he may be most relevant, his discipline now woven into daily life, and they are not happy about it.

In response to images of Prince’s Instagram paintings posted to his social media accounts, viewers accused him of theft, called for lawsuits, encouraged suicide, or simply asserted that he sucks and that his work augers the death of creativity. Users complained that the images were stolen, that the original creator is entitled to compensation, that the works shouldn’t carry a $100,000 price tag, and even that it is wrong for any artist to receive any money for their work. These images have previously been called sexist, in an artnet article by Paddy Johnson, and by others. Unsurprisingly, those who have had their likeness appropriated have been called victims, a demonym often flogged by enraged interlopers, whether it’s warranted or not.^[3]

There are a lot of reasons why these complaints lack merit. To begin with, any image posted on Instagram is subject to the terms and conditions set by Instagram and agreed to by anyone who uses the app. The company exercises some control and can prohibit certain pictures that it deems offensive, or that violate copyright law. All this stuff is in the terms of use.[4] And Instagram is already making money with targeted advertising, leveraging user data and attention for product placements.^[5] So whether Prince makes paintings or not, someone else is being enriched by the labor and intellectual property of the app’s users. Instagram and other apps basically make a leisure activity of unpaid work, producing data.

Further, Prince’s paintings fall under fair use provisions of copyright law. The image on Prince’s canvas may include the poster’s original photo, but it is significantly different. For one thing, it’s pixilated and printed in large scale on canvas by Prince, rather than existing compactly on anyone’s smartphone.^[6] Moreover, it isn’t just the original photo, but the entire textual and iconographic layout, including the frame created by Instagram and comments added by other users. His commentary acts as both a kind of intervention, final authorial word, signature, and as a type of contextualization, not unlike the signature of “R. Mutt” on Duchamp’s Fountain (1917).

Even minimal alteration or change to the, like, aura of the work can be sufficient. In a 2009 lawsuit, Cariou v. Prince, photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince for infringement when his documentary photographs were reproduced with minor alterations. Cariou won, initially, and received a settlement, but the ruling was overturned on appeal. The appellate judge found that reasonable observers could distinguish Prince’s work from Cariou’s original. And likewise, we — viewers — can tell the difference between a digital photograph and a photograph printed on canvas with a lot of extra visual information.

Unlike even Cariou, it strains credibility to imagine that Prince is depriving Instagram users of income. It seems safe to presume that very few users post images for free and also expectation remuneration. Those who are interested in printing out their images (or screenshots of their images with the additional framing devices and comments, as Prince has done) are still free to do so and to sell them on an open market. Selena “Missy Suicide” Mooney, co-founder of the softcore erotica website SuicideGirls, did just this after one of her models found a Prince-appropriated image of herself for sale at Frieze. In a publicity stunt, Mooney sold exact replicas of Prince’s work for $90, one-one thousandth of the reported price of his originals. All proceeds from her sales were pledged to a charity.

Artcritical contributor David Carrier and I came to the same realization. Carrier explained that this situation is what the scholar and philosopher Arthur Danto called “indiscernables.” The original and the artist’s copies are related but dissimilar, and they’re not in competition with one another. Warhol’s Soup Cans don’t compete with Campbell’s Soup Company or its advertisements. Early in his career Prince also photographed advertisements, such as cowboys pictured in ads for Marlboro cigarettes. Prince and the ad photographer operated in separate markets, and in fact the ad photographer had already been paid (probably well) by the time Prince copied his or her work. So it also goes with Mooney’s models, and with many of the other celebrities pictured on his canvases.

Importantly, the artworks are valuable neither because they’re novel nor because they’re from a photo app, but because they’re being offered by Gagosian as artworks by Richard Prince.^[7] Here is one issue of sexism, which is different from the one proffered by Johnson and others. Johnson’s critique is that Prince’s Instagram paintings often reproduce objectifying images of women and his signatory commentary is interpreted as snide and silencing, which is probably true.^[8] There is, I think, a clearer and more essential issue of sexism here: although there are several male artists who could plausibly produce and sell this kind of work for very high prices, there are comparatively few women who could command these prices for this product — maybe Lawler, Levine, or Cindy Sherman. These perseverating structural inequities in the art world are sexist, whether or not Prince’s particular images are or not.

Ralske notes that Prince is essentially printing money, and this kind of split between the exorbitant amounts commanded by eminent artists, compared to the fractional prices achieved by everyone else in the long tail, is another kind of institutional inequality. The market’s stratification is matched (created) by the shrinking number of increasingly wealthy oligarchs able to compete with one another in a poorly regulated marketplace. It’s also a reflection of growing inequality generally, globally. This is art as commodity speculation. It seems unlikely that collectors are spending so much money strictly for the image posted by the quoted Instagram user. If they wanted these images, many of which are casual selfies, they could likely buy them directly from the user for almost nothing, or they can see them on Instagram for free — both on Prince’s account and on the accounts of those he copies.[9] They can print, download, or copy the images, and Prince himself has encouraged aggrieved users to do so. What he’s doing doesn’t have to be unique.

Nonetheless, many criticisms expect Prince to be unique, but only in the way some people imagine art should be.^[10] Complaints of unoriginality and deskilling or laziness here center on the fact that the images aren’t manually mimetic, that is: Prince hasn’t copied a likeness by his trained hand, that he cheated by using a tool. The anxiety of easy art has coursed through culture for a few hundred years, at least.^[11] The fear that art is a facile con job remains potent and perennial. Which is not to say that no lazy art exists; we’re awash with it, as no doubt we’ve always been. But bad art’s poverty rarely has to do with technical issues, since some of the worst artworks can be supremely executed, just as certainly as they can be craftless junk abstractions. Or they can be copied images from the Web.

Given the digital platform from which Prince’s Instagram paintings spring, one might call them “vernacular.” Non-attribution, anonymity, and copying are endemic to the Web, and there is little practical distinction between Prince’s paintings and a retweet, a circulating image macro, or the re-enactment of a viral video, such as 2013’s briefly popular Harlem Shake craze. Even beyond the Internet, copying and stealing are deeply embedded in culture generally and historically. In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme,” a term now often confused with image macros found all over the Internet.^[12] But what Dawkins meant by the word is far broader: it’s any information that spreads through culture, from Shakespeare’s neologisms to articulated human rights to miniskirts to a catchphrase. Lawrence Lessig, in his book Free Culture (Penguin, 2004), asserts that civilization absolutely depends on elaboration and copying to spread ideas and share information. Prince’s use of Instagram — a medium that explicitly encourages widespread reproduction — points to this engagement with culture, which is exactly what so many of the app’s users find engaging.

It’s worth asking, as Johnson indicates, how in an age of easy copies an artist can sell copies for such high prices. She writes, “Copy-paste culture is so ubiquitous now that appropriation remains relevant only to those who have piles of money invested in appropriation artists.” Peter Schjeldahl also touches on this, writing that the invention of Instagram art was nigh inevitable, but the appeal of Prince’s paintings is brief and that they don’t need to be seen in person to be understood.

However, many people engaged fully in copying and pasting, but only tangentially engaged with the art world (if at all), misunderstand them. Everything in this essay till now is probably a pedantic description of well-trod ground for art cognoscenti, but perhaps dubious to everyone else. So one big, obvious problem of Prince’s work is not even specific to him: the sharp division between the business of art and everything else.

How did it come to be that in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, artists such as Joseph Beuys and Duchamp made strong arguments that anyone can be an artist and that anything can be art, and yet that knowledge has remains locked in a domain of specialists and insiders? Has the domain been made smaller and smaller? As with complex financial tools used by bond traders on Wall Street, the growing amount of money spent on art appears to have cleaved a small echo chamber for knowledge reserved as arcane and valuable, whether it truly is or not. And as with financial markets, the disparities of pay are masked by more inane questions about whether artists should be paid at all, instead of looking at how a system works that rewards a few people greatly and the vast majority very little.

Is the dictum that anybody can be an artist resisted by those anybodies who still believe that only special, innately talented people make art? Although a pretty broad definition of art probably predominates, if you tell people that what they do can be art, they apparently reject the notion, or at least if it’s done for large sums of money by someone using what many lay people dispense freely, even compulsively, online. They don’t seem to want copying weighted by that significance, as if the process could be tarnished by (or could tarnish) a world that they’ve likely been told they don’t understand and can’t participate in, and where the financial stakes are alleged to be very high. Art is special, but the wide popularity of Instagram seems to designate the service as vulgar and, by transference, anything that exists on it. Consequently, Prince’s amateur critics implicitly (sometimes explicitly) urge that we should regard with suspicion a person who attempts to make it a space where art might occur, where it can become self-reflexive, critical, ambivalent, tricky — “It’s just Instagram,” as if that means activity there doesn’t matter.

Even if this is the dullest, worst art ever made, why banality should raise such visceral anger is inexplicable. At heart, beyond all the rhetoric of victimization and copyright and redundancy, this resistance seems to be the concern: art is culture and culture is serious. The subtext of “Your copies are taking away their photos,” sounds like “You’re taking away our fun.” The worry is not that Prince is copying, but perhaps that his copying impinges upon one’s own, and one’s control over rebuttal, deletion. And it does so with art-world forces that appear to expensive and separate the image from everything else. In which case, although the reactionary fury is dumbly vented, the underlying angst about the social role, monetary value, and intellectual boundaries of art is a real problem. Unlike art history and copyright and sexism and techne, the cause and the solution for that problem is much more difficult to resolve or even describe. One can hope that the wider audience and frothing attention paid to work like Prince’s might initiate that conversation.

^[1] I can only think of one ancient culture known for prizing ingenuity over tradition in its official artworks: Mayan scholars routinely invented new ways of writing their hieroglyphics, rather than hewing to any particular convention. Others might exist — I’m not sure. Originality and authorship just weren’t very big concerns for much of art’s history.

[2] In the remainder of this piece I describe Prince’s detractors, meaning his critics outside the professional arts. Later discussions of writing by critics who thoughtfully wrestle with and place Prince’s work in context, such as Paddy Johnson, Kurt Ralske, and Peter Schjeldahl, are exceptions and not the focus of this essay.

^[3] Conversely, some fans have begged him to use their images in his work.

[4] Users who don’t want such censorship can use another service with more amenable terms.

^[5] Additionally, in 2012 Instagram included language in a new Terms of Service agreement that appeared to provide them rights to all content on their servers, which could be sold to third parties without compensation to the user. After much outcry, Instagram removed the clause and stated unequivocally that it was not their intention to sell users’ images and data. But they retained language that prohibits users from bringing class action lawsuits against them, leading some business journalists to speculate that the company may be protecting itself from angry users should they revert to that policy again in the future. In short: Instagram may someday sell images and other data stored on their servers. Facebook (Instagram’s parent company), and other platforms, similarly claim rights over user content stored on their servers.

^[6] This might be part of the worry, since it makes the image no longer vaporous and passing, takes away the possibility of deletion, should its original author reconsider it in the future.

^[7] In this, too, one sees another real problem on the periphery of Prince’s work. Many of those angry at Prince (presumably art neophytes, but who knows) might object to the high price. A friend of mine, a professional artist, remarked that the $90,000 pricetags seemed surprisingly low. Those sums seem to both justify their status as art for the market, and cast doubt upon it for those ignorant of its operations.

^[8] Such assertions seem perhaps plausible, I don’t know. I’m not sure how earnest or spiteful Prince is. His comments are usually too cryptic for me to parse, though the flavor can be lecherous or juvenile. However, I assume I’ve got a blind spot in this regard.

[9] There’s not much of a market for self-portraits such as these, even including the outlier case of Kim Kardashian’s recent book of selfies, Selfish (Rizzoli, 2015)

^[10] While they complain about printed screenshots of amateurs and living celebrities, Prince’s scolds are seemingly indifferent to the artist posting images Burl Ives or Barbara Billingsley copied from movies, and his critics may do likewise on their own Instagram feeds.

^[11] Earlier in Western culture, Socrates worried conversely that the implementation of original writing would ruin culture by weakening memory and tradition. While once culture was feared corruptible by invention, it is now imagined to be corruptible by non-invention. And yet culture persists.

^[12] Image macros are the popular pictures with funny text appended in block letters, such as cats talking in a juvenile dialect.

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