September 8 – October 14, 2018
132 Delancey St, 2nd Floor, Norfolk Street at Delancey
New York City, mitchellalgusgallery.com

In June, the European Union began deliberations on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, a proposal to unify EU laws regarding copyrighted material online. It has alarmed Internet activists because Article 13 of the Directive apparently suggests that memes using copyrighted material could be outlawed. How this could be enforced is really a headscratcher, and protesters have posted many clever, teasing examples of how, using Photoshop filters or the like to slightly alter pictures, predicted regulatory mechanisms might be circumvented.

People like to copy familiar pictures, to take in hand the fruits of culture, even if they had no part in creating the original.

So now at Mitchell Algus is a show of work by the Swiss photographer Hannes Schmid, “American Myth: Paintings and Photographs,” in which the artist has stolen his own memes. Schmid is best known for his iconic photos of heroic figures: arena rock musicians such as ZZ Top, David Lee Roth, Cheap Trick etc., and cowboys used in Marlboro Man cigarette ads between 1992 and 2002, shot with a memetic template established in the ‘50s. Those cowboy pictures were some of many (by various photographers) appropriated by Richard Prince, whose oeuvre entails rephotographing existing images. While Schmid is largely unrecognized by the general public, Prince is the art world’s notorious prankster/villain/thief. In “American Myth,” Schmid reclaims his own work, presenting four small black-and-white photographs, and four large hyperrealist paintings by Schmid of his own cowboys.

Of the photographs, made between 1998 and 2002, the one I find most interesting is Walk in the Woods (1998). It’s curious, as all of the photos show ranchers in rugged wilderness, the infinity of the mythical American West. Walk… shows its cowboy subject riding through forest accessible to probably teenagers, who’ve carved their initials into several tree trunks. The pictures have the kind of archetypal and repetitious western imagery that has been familiar since at least Frederic Remington, and have similarly romantic names: e.g. Long Shadows of Rest (2000), A Drag Moment (2002), punning a cigarette jutting from the creased lips of a drover.

Schmid’s a capable enough painter. Although the canvases reach for and don’t accomplish, say, Richard Estes, they’re good—the best being the dusty Cowboy #230 (2017). (They’re more technically adept than Prince’s own paintings, for what it’s worth.) The images are bromidically heroic and familiar. One, Cowboy #1 (Round ‘em up), from 2007, shows a group of ranchers driving cattle through Monument Valley. It’s an ur-Western image, recalling, for instance, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Cowboy #5 (Tailgate) (2007), features a man laying erotically on his side, in the bed of an old pickup, leaning forward to light his cigarette, Stetson obscuring his chiseled face. I can’t tell if these are paradigmatic because they refer to the characteristics that define masculinity in the west, or because these familiar images helped define exactly what those characteristics are.

This move of Schmid painting his own photos is presented as triumphant and pugilistic, though it’s very little of a victory to reiterate the same photographic meme. The philosopher Vilém Flusser bleakly described, in his 1983 monograph Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the tendent entropy of images, that many are reproduced over and over into cultural background noise, such as cowboys, for instance. Schmid’s tactic is shrewd, and so is claiming agency pitted against the villain Prince. But one might ask: what else are we supposed to do with these pictures?

I think there’s a divide between how art-worlders and lay people perceive the morality of artistic copying and appropriation—that the latter thinks it’s illegitimate. But more and more I imagine a contingency. A few years ago, trolls berated Prince on social media when he showed a body of work made by printing other people’s Instagram selfies on canvas. Many of the aggrieved, if you looked at their social media, also traffic in memes appropriating copyrighted content, making their outrage look confected and hypocritical. The qualifier I think is the belief that copying and appropriation should be reserved for regular Joes as forms of folk art, opposed to both the professionalism of the international art market and large corporations. (There are obviously caveats here: both small-time artists and, say, huge movie franchises can win plaudits for basically being hacks.)

When I told a friend I was going to see a show of Schmid’s work, explaining that his pictures had been appropriated by Prince, my friend declared, “Fuck Richard Prince,” citing Prince as a larcener of vulnerable artists. Schmid is a photographer who has hung around the upper echelons of entertainment and was paid to continue an iconic campaign glorifying a food industry that is objectively bad for people and the planet, used to market a product designed to addict and kill users, but he’s one of the hoi polloi trampled by a corporation like Prince. There’s the old adage, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, that good artists borrow, great artists steal. And perhaps in the arts, most of the looting actually resembles petty theft at a chain store: calculated into the business model, with no apparent victim, and being of little consequence.

The post “Fuck Richard Prince”: The Stolen Memes of Hannes Schmid appeared first on artcritical.

ERIC SUTPHIN: How does collaboration function in relation to Modernism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the artist?

EMILIA AND ILYA KABAKOV: This is a very interesting question, especially considering that there are more and more artists working in pairs. Obviously there are reasons why in some cases a collaborative process can be better than those made in a solitary process. We can say that the personality of each artist, working in collaboration with the other reveals much more than when he/she works by his or herself.

One of your aims has been to restore painting’s tension, or its potential for rupture. One strategy for you is figuration, in particular, looking back to Baroque painting. What is it about figurative painting that contains the possibility for difficulty or conflict?

The return to painting and a Baroque approach has two sides: there are some elements that are working on rupture and others which are uniting everything on the canvas.

The first is a collage of all the elements of the painting, the fragmentary nature. This is the special technique that we use for such paintings in order to unite these elements. The elements of collage can consist of images from different times, but the wholeness is created by using one artistic approach for these elements stemming from different eras, in our case the style of Pierre Bonnard.

It seems that the increasing scale and ambition of your work — in particular the evolution from the 1995 Pompidou exhibition to the 2014 Monumenta presentation — has a direct correlation to an ever-expanding global art market. How has increasing globalization and decentralization of the “art world” affected your practice?

We come from a country where the art market did not exist and it is very easy to continue to disregard it. If this is about the art market, this is already such a covered territory that we are afraid to even start such a discussion. The same goes for globalization. In some aspects it does work very well, but in others it creates a catastrophe for artists, especially younger ones.

The scale of our work increases depending on the ideas and concepts and has nothing to do with the market, globalization or decentralization. The scale of the installation at the Pompidou in 1995 was in consideration of the idea we presented and the space that was available to us, the same as the project in 2014 at Monumenta.

How has the role of institutions affected the scope and scale of your projects?

That was the main factor of influence on our projects, both in museums and other art institutions. We do make a distinction between an exhibition at a museum and an exhibition at a gallery. A gallery can limit your scale and imagination, and in many cases takes an already existing work with the intention to sell. The museum, kunsthalle, kunstverein, or public space has a very specific aura and atmosphere. This stimulates your imagination and fantasy, giving you the freedom that comes with space. Unfortunately the only limit is the budget.

What scope do you hope to reach and how does ambition and scale relate to your notion of the art world as a utopian fantasy?

The most ideal result of what we are trying reach and achieve is our last exhibition at The Grand Palais for the 2014 Monumenta presentation. The Grand Palais was a utopian project, a glass palace from the end of the 19^th century. For us the possibility to realize a utopian, grandiose project in this superb space was and is the best, ideal project in the art world.

Do you see your work as nostalgic for a time when recognizable imagery had more currency than it may hold today?

The interest in painting is definitely a nostalgic interest, but at the same time there is always a hidden hope that the life of your paintings will belong to the future.

Can you discuss the ways in which representational painting functions as a conceptual, rather than purely narrative, device within your practice.

EMILIA: All the paintings are done on a project basis, as a concept as well as a narrative. Even if the narrative is used, there is a concept. But we should say that Russian conceptualism is built on narrative.

ILYA: All of my paintings are conceptual works. This means that those paintings are not only a method of explaining and representing myself as a traditional artist and painter who spends all his life working in one medium or one “visual corridor,” but rather presenting different projects which come to mind all the time. These appear not rationally, like any self-respecting artist would do, but spontaneously — one after another, or simultaneously.

Who are some artists who have been important to you?

ILYA: In the 1960s through the 1980s I did belong to a group of Moscow Conceptual artists and because of the complete isolation of the Soviet art world, I had very little knowledge of what was going on in the Western art world. In our circle the art works were always connected to a specific project. I did paintings or objects that were connected to either a Soviet bureaucratic design, a parody of official Soviet artworks, or paintings that appeared to be done by different artistic personae including characters such as the “untalented artist.”

The paintings now on view at Pace belong to the same kind of design but with a different context that we are interested in now. The concept of these paintings is to presume that there is now movement or new developments in contemporary art. As in the time of the Renaissance, we have to look back and start using the achievements of the past, remembering that the Renaissance artists used the achievements of the ancient Greeks.

So which model from the past can contemporary artists today use as an example? We are thankful that such an example from the past can be the Baroque movement. The strange combination of Baroque art and contemporary can be what we need in order to solve the problems in contemporary painting. If we are wrong, well, we will just move on to the next concept.

The post A Concept and a Narrative: Emilia and Ilya Kabakov Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

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.

The post What’s Not the Matter With Richard Prince appeared first on artcritical.

Juliet Helmke on aerial photography
Kurt Ralske on Richard Prince
Sabrina Mandanici on Samuel Fosso
Alexandra Nicolaides on the photographs from Ferguson, MO
Lindsay Comstock on Melanie Schiff
Lee Ann Norman on appropriation
David Carrier on Harry Roseman
David Carbone on Balthus

Full index entry for “photography” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical

The post Recent Photography at artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

Richard Prince uses Instagram, but not in the way most people do. While you or I might dip into that infinite stream of pixels for idle diversion or cheap thrills, what we see or say is usually inconsequential and ephemeral. Prince goes on Instagram, and somehow the result is important and enduring art. With an alchemist’s touch, what was worthless becomes precious. It couldn’t be easier: Prince trawls the app for selfies of young female hotties (famous or merely Internet-famous or totally amateur), posts a comment on the photo, captures the screen, and has an assistant inkjet-print it onto canvas at 65 x 48 inches. He calls these 40 images “paintings”; you might object, but collector dollars speak louder than you do.

Is there a reason to interpret the endeavor as anything other than some simple economic activity devoid of other meaning, like, for example, printing money? This easy explanation is tempting, in exactly the way a late-afternoon nap on the couch is tempting. Are we obligated to try to avoid “following the money,” even if that requires a true-believer devotion to art as a realm beyond politics?

Since his emergence in the late ‘70s as part of the Pictures Generation, Prince has always been the naughtiest of appropriators. Unlike Cindy Sherman, he has little respect for history; unlike Louise Lawler, he takes little interest in the art world; unlike Jeff Koons, he doesn’t fetishize craft or expensive raw materials (two of the most universally accepted indications of artistic value). With Prince, it’s just take, take, take.

In 2011, a US District court judge ruled that Prince’s appropriation of Patrick Cariou’s photographs for his 2008 “Canal Zone” exhibition constituted copyright infringement. His New Portraits can be read as Prince’s response to this defeat, by implying that his transgressions are no worse that the common and familiar act of re-posting images on the Internet. He just happens to re-post on the walls of Gagosian, that’s all.

It’s not news that digital data can be reproduced perfectly with little effort, and that many of us take and share it freely. If a press release asserted, “Prince’s appropriation holds a mirror to our contemporary moment,” we’d probably agree without much thought. Prince is merely commenting on the way images circulate in 2014, someone might argue.

It’s advisable to think harder. What Prince and Gagosian are up to isn’t a game; massive amounts of capital are being created and accumulated here. Artnet reports that between January 2011 and August 2014, $106,995,896 worth of Prince’s art was sold on the secondary market (placing him at #7 among living artists for this period, ahead of Damien Hirst and Peter Doig). Thus Prince’s modus operandi is not analogous to the common man’s copyright-blind illegal downloads and shares, which serve to disperse valuation instead of concentrating it. What it really resembles is Facebook’s profiteering strategies, which convert what is freely given into a valuable commodity.

It’s become evident that the Internet is a tool more for consolidating power than dispersing it. It has made our economy more “efficient,” meaning that it concentrates more wealth in the hands of fewer individuals and corporations, faster and with less effort. This, precisely, is what Prince mirrors — though the work itself gives little space for reflection.

The readymade recently had its centennial, so the gesture of re-photographing is hardly transgressive. And yet Prince may occupy a sort of radical position, in that his work is so morally untenable. When an artist like Santiago Sierra performs unethical acts in creating his work (such as hiring 30 day laborers and arranging them in a gallery according to their skin color), the work intentionally brings the evil within the art into dialogue with evil in the world. Instead, Prince’s cynical but collector-friendly exploitation exists within a vacuum. It presents the viewer with a challenge: do we carry on with the business of art-consumption as usual when to do so means a tacit affirmation of the ethos of “greed is good”? What if the zombie ghost of the avant-garde walked among us as nothing other than Mark Zuckerberg’s lack of ethics and our complicity with it?

Should art be more than expensive clickbait? Though Prince did not take any of the Instagram photos, his selection of them and his appended comments act as a signature for these portraits. Like the best comments on the Internet, they are funny, rude, and passive-aggressive. On a shot of a spread-legged Kate Moss in the forest, he writes, “I remember this so well, glad we had the tent.” Under an image of a black woman with rainbow dreads, Prince writes “DJ Trippy Headrin” (a pun surely lost on her demographic). It’s an occasion for a 64-year-old man to demonstrate his impressive mastery of a specific Internet argot: troll-speak, those booby-trapped non sequiturs which first parse as a “like,” but on second glance are revealed to be a total diss.

Perhaps Prince was always a king-size troll avant la lettre. His snarkiness couldn’t really blossom until its true medium, the Internet, was invented. And, the Internet attains its quintessence in the heteronormative blue-chip mind-fuckery of this most accomplished of trolls.

Instagram’s Community Standards FAQ helpfully explains:

Instagram is a place where people can share beautiful moments from their lives, and when you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.

Would most people have a problem if their Instagram selfie popped up for sale in Gagosian? If yes, then the consummate post-Modernist Prince has accomplished a feat any Modernist would be proud of. His New Portraits make the thinking viewer feel sad inside.

The post Try to Make Yourself a Work of Art: Richard Prince’s New Portraits at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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Supports/Surfaces
Canada
June 7 to July 20, 2014
333 Broome Street (between Bowery and Chrystie)
New York City, 212 925 4631

Right now there is a great deal of interest within the New York art world in looking backward, seeking visual inspiration in modernism. Two current group shows are exemplary models of this revisionist historical thinking. Starting in the 1960s, many otherwise varied artists in Europe and New York employed shaped canvases. Inspired by the 1964 Guggenheim Museum exhibition “The Shaped Canvas,” Luxembourg & Dayan, housed on three floors of a majestic, very narrow Upper East Side townhouse, has organized an exhibition of 28 paintings employing this device. Starting around 1966, a group of Frenchmen of the Supports/Surfaces movement developed a remarkable synthesis of deconstructive philosophy, the political ideas of Mao and the decorative pure color found in Matisse’s late cutouts. Canada, a downtown gallery, has assembled a show of 22 paintings by these artists, in collaboration with the Parisian Galerie Bernard Ceysson.

Harvey Quaytman, Elizabeth Murray and Kenneth Noland painted abstractions on shaped frames; Claes Oldenberg, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann used them to present figurative subjects. Some painters, such as Ron Gorchov, used the shaped canvas as a way to structure their pictures. Richard Prince, whose 1994 Untitled (Protest Painting) contains the outlined shape of a sloganless protest sign, is exemplary of artists who set shaped structures within a pictorial rectangle. In presenting a marvelous variety of shaped canvases, Luxembourg & Dayan generates some surprising, unexpected juxtapositions: Pino Pascali’s Coda di Delfino (1966), a jokey dolphin-shaped painting on wood, is set alongside Creede II (1961), a copper-colored, shaped work by Frank Stella. Jeremy De Prez’s Untitled (2014), which presents a seemingly rumpled plaid design, is hung next to John Armleder’s Lotta di gladiatori — The Best (2014). The exhibition ends with two marvelously funny pictures, Steven Parrino’s very orderly The Chaotic Painting (2006), a triangle shape, and Jacob Kassay’s Partial Credit (2014), a not-quite-rectangular canvas with the title printed on the right edge of the frame.

The Supports/Surfaces painters were a loosely organized movement centered in the South of France, linked together, at least initially, by their fascination with bookish philosophizing. Searching for an alternative to the practice of Clement Greenberg’s color field painters, these artists freely appropriated ideas from Michael Fried’s formalism and the Marxism of Marcelin Pleynet and Philippe Sollers, writers associated with the Parisian journal Tel Quel. Jean-Michel Meurice created strips of intense color like Vinyle (1976); Claude Viallat presented repeated patterns on dyed fabric or rope lattices hung directly on the wall, as in 1972/F14 (1972); Louis Cane employed repetitive rubber-stamping — Toile tamponnée (1967) is an example.

Artists who otherwise had no connection with one another have employed the shaped canvas. Using a shaped canvas doesn’t require any high-powered theorizing. And so it’s unsurprising that this pictorial format has been adapted by such a motley assortment of figures as Lucio Fontana, Mary Heilmann and Damien Hirst, on view at Luxembourg & Dayan. By contrast, although the Supports/Surfaces works can be seen as deconstructed paintings, what remains of that art form when you remove the stretcher and display the unstretched canvas or, conversely, present just the frame, sans canvas? This style of art making was parasitic upon what now seem like dated critical, cultural, and aesthetic theories. French writers drew an equivalence between what in the catalogue Joe Fyfe calls “the fabric of society” and the structures of bourgeois painting, making a link between the “radical social engagement” of French Maoists and deconstructive visual practice. If you remove the unstable supporting synthesis of formalist interpretation and political analysis, all that remains of Supports/Surfaces art is good looking decorative constructions. That perhaps explains why these artists haven’t had much impact within the American art world. When the New York artists looked to Europe for inspiration, it looked to Germany. As yet these Frenchmen don’t belong in the post-modernist canon. The show at Canada was handsomely hung, but by presenting this art with too little reference to its original context, the catalogue did not adequately support what could have been an important revisionist exhibition.

Note:

My account of Supports/Surfaces borrows from Raphael Rubinstein, “The Painting Undone: Supports/Surfaces” at https://www.artcritical.com/2004/02/01/the-painting-undone-supportssurfaces. The quotation from Joe Fyfe comes from the foreword of Surface/Support (New York and Paris: Canada Gallery with Galerie Bernard Ceysson, 2014).

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“There wasn’t really a plan. I’ve never been included in any photography based survey, museum show, photo magazine. I’ve heard that Peter Galassi hates my work. That he would never acknowledge it in the photo department at MoMA. I think he’s wrong. I think my photo work is all about photography. But there was never an idea about where the work was going at the beginning when I started to re-photograph images. When you don’t have any training in a particular medium you can bring something to it that hasn’t been brung (sic). I “brung” the sheriff and I shot him. I killed photography. Maybe they hated that.. I always look for my name in Photography mags but I never see it. Maybe I should have “rescued” photography.”
RICHARD PRINCE FROM AN ON-GOING (UNPUBLISHED) E-MAIL INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN APPEL – SEPTEMBER 26TH, 2005.

On November the 9th, one day after Richard Prince had broken his own personal artist record at auction and set a new world auction record for the medium of photography I contacted the international head of photography at Christie’s auction house with the following e-mail:

BRIAN APPEL – Richard Prince is now the most successful photographer alive!

PHILIPPE GARNER – So – Richard Prince takes the crown as the author of THE MOST EXPENSIVE PHOTOGRAPH EVER SOLD AT AUCTION. I am pleased at a professional level, that this is a Christie’s achievement. Personally, this result sets me questioning the ways in which photographic history, and especially recent photographic history, has been written, seemingly reconfigured, by a relatively narrow audience. I am not saying that readings of photography that put Prince where he is are flawed. Clearly Prince is hailed as a Contemporary Artist, a man of ideas whose chosen medium is, perhaps appropriately, photographic. His admirers are not wrong. What I question is the disproportion between the consequences of acclaim in the Contemporary Art forum as against acclaim in other contexts not fueled by testosterone $$$s. What do you think?

BA – Excellent question. Given the fact that Christie’s has identified 82% of last evening’s buyers as American – testosterone does play an important role. The Prince piece, the cowboy image, is absolutely about this very mythology – the mythic, lone, powerfully independent American pioneer. Prince, of course, is really commenting on the machinery of America, the Madison Avenue advertising myth-making machinery that we export around the world and whose underlying meaning is all about what America needs to see reflected in its mirror. Prince nailed this back in the early 80s and here it is in all its hilarious glory sitting on your walls in the auction room right opposite and closest to your Honorary Chairman and Chief Auctioneer Christopher Burge and at the auction preview peaking out brilliantly so you could see it as you walked into the ‘great room’. It is also a victory for photography in that like the role the invention of photography performed at its inception liberating painting from the need to reflect what was happening in the world, Prince’s “Cowboy” releases the medium of photography from its burden to record what the camera is placed in front of. Prince’s piece is really about turning the camera inward.

Probably the buyer(s) of this work were not embracing these art historical meanings when they purchased this artwork, but they were smart enough to intuit that this work, and Prince’s work in general is important and somehow uniquely American. They also were wise enough to place it in their “BEST OF” category as they go about their business of collecting the very best seminal pieces for their “BEST OF” Contemporary collections.

PG – Excellent answer. I acknowledge that Prince’s subject matter is BIG – bigger than the overt content of the images.. He really does see a (metaphorical) bigger picture and expresses his position/attitude – call it what you will – very effectively with an exceptional economy of means. Hats off to him (Stetsons of course).

Prince’s isolation of the tokens of masculinity by re-photographing Madison Avenue’s longest-running fiction, the ridin’, ropin’ Marlboro man are generally thought to be the images that made the artist’s name in the art world. By using the camera to revisit a stage-managed, artificially constructed model created for mass consumption, Prince’s cowboy can be looked upon as not only a re-fashioning of history but also a denial of one of the main tenets of the medium of photography – its inherent ability to record ‘truth’. Excited by this exchange with Philippe and curious about what others would think about the impact of this momentous occurrence, I forwarded this e-mail correspondence to a number of art professionals under the heading – “A SHORT CONVERSATION WITH PHILIPPE GARNER, THE INTERNATIONAL HEAD OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT CHRISTIE’S REGARDING THE RICHARD PRINCE PHOTOGRAPH “Untitled (Cowboy)”, 1989, THAT BROKE THE WORLD AUCTION RECORD FOR ANY PHOTOGRAPH”. Additionally, as I received responses, I sent those out to the same list. In the order I received comments, I bring you, dear reader, their unedited, verbatim thoughts. “For Your Eyes Only” is the beginning, I hope, of more articles that introduce important events in the world of art that are addressed in a ‘round-table’ e-mail format by a number of specialists who share their thoughts on the subject.

BRIAN PAUL CLAMP – director of photo gallery / ClampArt, New York – It is telling that the first photograph to fetch more than one million dollars was a contemporary artwork by a living artist as opposed to a classic, vintage print. Of course, the significance of Richard Prince’s contribution to postmodern art cannot be underestimated. His Marlboro men (along with Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills) typify the “death of painting” discourse popular in the late 70s and early 80s that set the stage for much of the contemporary art being produced today. Nonetheless, despite my own enthusiasm for and investment in contemporary art, one must first acknowledge that it certainly is the flavor of the day, and the fact that an editioned print by a living artist can fetch far more at auction than a vintage photograph by an acknowledged “master” (whatever that means), may speak more of fashion than sound financial speculation (in the short term, anyway). Granted, such a statement likely seems a bit snarky. Perhaps the traditional photography market is still poised for a major upswing. Or, could it be that the art dealers’ construction of the complicated and troublesome concept of a “vintage print” (typically defined as a photograph made within one to five years of the negative date) has never been wholly accepted or embraced by the large part of the art-buying public?

ALEX NOVAK – photo dealer / Vintage Works Ltd., Chalfont, Pa. / writer, publisher / E – Photo Newsletter – Yeah, I was watching this one too. It’s a shame it sold. I don’t think a lot about Prince’s color copy prints of ads. Anyone could do this work, and I don’t think much about his explanation for it.

His concepts are tired, simplistic ideas that have little to add to any dialogue. And his derivative images just plain bore the heck out of me. Will he go up in value? Most probably, at least for the short to medium term. But that is a fake market value being built up around him and a few other “contemporary artists” by the art market. I hope the actual photographer he is ripping off and Marlboro both sue the hell out of Prince and his dealer. There is plenty of legal precedent for that.

DAVID ZWIRNER – art dealer / David Zwirner, New York – It is surprising that the first million dollar photograph would be a contemporary work and not a vintage photograph. However, given the importance of photography in the artist’s output over the last 25 years and the technological breakthroughs in large-scale color photography it was only a matter of time until the million dollar mark would be broken. It is of course ironic that it would be an appropriated image that makes the leap, thus throwing a question mark at the traditional role of authorship that dominates the vintage photography market.

GREGOR MUIR – director of exhibitions / Hauser + Wirth, London – Prince has made a significant contribution to contemporary art through his use of “re-photography”. Of all the different series using this technique, the “Cowboy” series remains the most profound. That Prince appropriated these images from Marlboro advertisements does not take away from the fact that the finished art works are so recognizably his. This is an important artist, an important body of work, and “UNTITLED (COWBOY)” is an exceptional example. One might say it’s a good day for the “re-photography” market.

DAILE KAPLAN – V.P., director of photographs / Swann Galleries, New York – It’s a measure of photography’s ubiquity in the popular imagination that a photograph has broken the million dollar barrier. That this work was created by a contemporary artist raises a number of interesting issues, not least of which is “what is a photograph?” From my perspective as an auction house specialist and scholar, post-modern discourse has fast-forwarded thinking about photography in a culture that, for the most part, is visually illiterate. Yes, the record for Richard Prince’s photograph is a marvelous watershed for our community. But, it also speaks to the need to cultivate a broader understanding of photographic expression in all its forms.

AVI SPIRA – art consultant / Art Ventures International, Inc., New York – Hard to add much as it’s a brief conversation thus far. The comments are certainly all appreciated (especially David’s [Zwirner]). I just think in 2005 we are so far removed from photography being defined as an artist taking his camera to the “street” and photographing reality, whatever that might be. Thomas Ruff makes camera-less photographs and Jeff Wall makes images that in actuality are a combination of hundreds. Vik Muniz makes photographs of precious collages based on paintings and Sugimoto’s portraits are not even photographs of real people. The list could go on and on. Photography is such a malleable and loosely defined medium at this point that I think any discussion of record prices for a photograph are somewhat moot.

I think the more important angle to “the Richard Prince story” is the real star of today’s market boom – Andy Warhol – as almost all successful artistic paths increasingly seem to now run through Warhol’s indelible and enormous footprints.

ROBERT MANN – Robert Mann Gallery, New York – I think this is a wonderful milestone for the art world! I am especially thrilled that you are succinctly classifying the Prince as a photograph. Along with David Zwirner, I too am surprised that the first photograph sold publicly for over one million dollars is not a vintage work by a classical photographer. I would venture to say that this record will be broken this winter when Sotheby’s auctions off works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art / Gilman Paper Company Collection. The Edward Steichen “The Pond – Moonlight” print will more than likely top the Prince.

MARLA HAMBURG KENNEDY – photo publisher / Picture This Publications, photo consultant / HK Photo, New York – I have been thinking about this a great deal. I find it very apropos that the new world record would be a photograph that has been made under the auspices of contemporary fine art. This is an artist that is clearly considered not a photographer but a fine artist who utilizes for some of his work, photography. It is far away from traditional classic photography concerns but ensconced in conceptual issues. Moreover it shows still the great gap between prices of classic photography that is shown in photography galleries and sold in photography auctions and contemporary photography that is shown in art galleries and sold at the contemporary sales. To wit, a major perhaps vintage unique photograph by one of the century’s greatest photographers (Arbus, Weston, Strand, Stieglitz, Frank) can be acquired for under $500,000, while this price is comparable to photographic works done in editions of 10 by an artist like Andreas Gursky (or Richard Prince).

In sum, in my opinion, this shows the stupendous opportunity to buy great works of photography at a relatively very low price compared to the other mediums, and growth potential in the market. I cannot encourage the collecting of important photography more!

MAUREEN BRAY – director of exhibitions / L&M Arts, New York – I think the Prince work is worth every penny that it made at auction. Zwirner makes an interesting point about contemporary photo vs. vintage print. I think the world is finally at a point where contemporary photography and fine art is synonymous. Therefore, we’ll see even more contemporary artists working in the photo medium achieve these auction results. But perhaps the older, vintage photographs may always be seen as a subset of “art”. As they continue to grow in historical significance, they will gain in value, but they may always be considered a subset. I look forward to watching that development. The question might be: what is the cut-off parameters for historical photographs or contemporary art that is in a photographic medium?

PETER MacGILL – photo dealer / Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York – Maureen Bray makes a lot of interesting points, but I don’t really agree that older, vintage photographs may always be seen as a subset of “art”. Even a cursory examination of art history reveals that photography and the other arts are clearly intertwined. Can one really consider Duchamp without Man Ray or vice versa? Those who have embraced this understanding have collected mightily and are, probably, the big winners for they have the goods. Collectors of contemporary art are collecting “vintage” photographs as they recognize their importance, place in history, rarity and archival qualities.  Do you think people understand the permanence issues relating to color photography?

STUART ALEXANDER – photo specialist / Christie’s, New York – In response to David Zwirner’s remark, I would say that there is no “question mark” because the “author” of the appropriated Marlboro ad is Richard Prince and not a lesser-known or anonymous artist, thus “authorship” still matters. In order for a “ready-made” to sell for large amounts of money it must be signed by the well-known artist.

SIMON de PURY – chairman and chief auctioneer / Phillips de Pury & Company, New York – This result in no way constitutes a surprise. First it is only a catching up of the public market place with the private one where the million dollar mark for photographs by Richard Prince had been surpassed on at least two occasions. If over the last two years new record prices for his work have been broken with great frequency it is only a long overdue recognition of the market for one of the greatest artists living today. This is an artist constantly evolving and whose recent and current work is as strong as anything he has ever done. Of the twenty most expensive Prince works sold to date at auction, six were photographs. Photography is just one of the mediums that this artist is working in with equal impact.

The art market in general and the photography market in particular are going through major changes so that in my view in the future the million dollar mark will often be beaten by major works of Richard Prince in any medium and in the photography market by a range of photographers both contemporary and past.

PAUL SACK – photo collector (Top 25 “ARTnews”) / San Francisco – I just think it is too bad that, with all the great photographs that have been taken since 1839, the first to sell at auction for more than $1million is a photograph of another photograph.

ROGER SZMULEWICZ – photo dealer / Fifty One Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium – I must say I am divided regarding this important event. On the one hand, I am delighted that a photograph has finally reached the one million dollar mark at auction as it has been dealing with the stigma of being seen as a ‘slightly lesser’ medium of the fine arts because of its unique properties – one of which is its potential for infinite reproduction. Certainly for a photograph to receive prices that are consistent with the other mediums such as painting and sculpture is a change in credibility that is late in coming. On the other hand, buying at auction can be an environment where anything is possible in terms of motivation to purchase. Craving social status, the desire to do something that is seen as intellectual or prescient, or buying for speculation purposes only could be factors motivating buyers besides the passion for the work of art itself. I do think however, that, whatever the motivations on behalf of buyers at auction, this activity is not a fad or a blip in the history of the medium. More of the same is on the horizon.

LESLIE TONKONOW – art dealer / Leslie Tonkonow, New York – Richard Prince is among the most significant artists of his generation. His ideas transcend the various mediums in which he works and his photographic pieces from the late 1970s and 1980s are among his most important works. Why ask the question about a photograph? Is this auction record noteworthy because someone was willing to spend more than a million dollars on a photograph or because it’s a type of color photograph predicted by experts to fade within three decades? What is fascinating and mystifying to me is the relationship of art and money. What constitutes value? What motivates the buyer? Is this an investment or lavish consumption?

OLIVER KAMM – art dealer (NADA) / 5BE Gallery, New York – Is it a photo? Yes and no – it’s really just part of an artist’s output. I think of him as a painter and a photographer and an appropriationist – so is it really just a photograph? No – he’s not just a photographer. I think he is hugely talented and I think these prices are off the charts. It doesn’t make sense. It’ll bite everyone in the ass. I’m just glad I’m not Barbara Gladstone having to deal with all this secondary work coming back on the market.

THEA WESTREICH – art advisor / Thea Westreich Art Advisory Service, New York – First, the Richard Prince photograph was not the first photographic work to break the million dollar mark. A Man Ray vintage photograph surpassed that mark some four years ago. The more important thing about the market in photography, both contemporary and vintage is that it is taking its place alongside other, more traditional mediums and is being accepted, as it should be, for its importance in overall art making practices. Having said this, it is equally important to accept the fact that standards of scholarship and connoisseurship lag far behind in the rapidly growing photography market. There are fewer catalogue raissonnes, less consensus on the standards to be applied to the evaluation of any given work of art, and generally not enough agreed upon information on issues of vintage, color stability, numbers of prints, etc.

With regard to the Richard Prince Cowboy, I have always felt that he chose the images made by advertising directors because they reflected his views on image making, which simply put, are more about how the viewer sees the image than the image itself. The truth and fiction issue lies in the creation of an image that is rich and fecund enough to defy a single read. Thus the cowboy is an icon to wide segments of the consuming public… he is sexy to both men and women, he represents freedom, he is both the iconic American and an outsider at the same time, and, he is on the road… another subject of interest to the artist which early in his work is reflected in the drawings he made out of car windows over car hoods… one need not say more. Richard’s work is highly considered and of whole cloth, richly woven with themes not always easily explicable, but always there for the curious and available eye.

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