Richard Prince

Richard Prince has stealing down to an art.

Which is why he's one of those artists everyone loves to hate. Prince practices re-photography, which is just a fancy way of saying he takes pictures of other people's pictures, alters them very slightly, and then calls them his own. This approach has landed him in some hot water though, with several lawsuits brought against him for copyright infringement. As much as he is hated for this by most, some people still gladly pay hundreds of thousands for his appropriated photos and paintings.

Prince is not the only member of his family who has had run-ins with the law. Turns out that his father was imprisoned for stockpiling weapons and ammunition. Like father like son, I guess. When he was younger, Richard was also detained in a Panama airport for five days.

Lately, Prince has pushed this plagiarism thing to a whole other level. He recently had a show where he displayed large screenshots of other people’s (mostly hot girls) Instagram photos, and most people were not too happy about it. This move landed him titles such as misogynistic and perverted. Better yet, these photos are selling for upwards of $100,000.

As infuriating as it to think that someone could be raking in the dough on your perfectly filtered selfie, it does bring to light that if you don’t want the world to see you choking down jell-o shooters, you should refrain from indulging in narcissistic delight. Perhaps Prince is just a crusader for a more refined culture. I think he is just capitalizing on the depravity of it all. Either way, it sure makes Richard Prince an easy target for art world criticism, and we love a good debate.

No one does controversy better than Richard Prince.

Prince practices “appropriation art,” the child of Pop Art, in which you steal someone else's idea and make it your own. Prince’s New Portraits exhibition, for example, is a collection of Instagram Posts your mate could have taken. It copped him a lawsuit from a woman who claims her image was used without her consent. In 2014, five more people sued Prince for the same thing. Ivanka Trump paid Prince $36,000 for a large scale portrait of herself from the series. Prince, in protest of her dear old dad's presidency, gave her the money back and went so far as to say, “This is not my work. I did not make it. I deny. I denounce. This is fake art,” echoing Daddy Trump's endless cries of "Fake news!" Ouch. But it reportedly made the commission even more valuable.

Controversy has shone its fluorescent spotlight on Prince for a long time. Prince once handed out copies of A Catcher in the Rye under his own name instead of J.D. Salinger’s. In the 1970s, he began work on a series titled Cowboys, images he photographed of photographer Sam Abell’s Marlboro cigarettes ads, cropping out the Marlboro logo. They sold for $3 million in 2014, leaving Abell as enraged as those Instagram influencers.

Prince likes to prank and provoke, and is coy about his biography. It's generally accepted that he was born in the Panama Canal Zone but the story that his parents were spies can’t be verified for sure. In 1967, when he was around 18 years old, he faked an interview with British sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard. In the 1980s he teamed up with eccentric art dealer Colin de Land to launch the career of John Dogg, who turned out to not actually exist.

Though he is a painter, it’s thanks to his short career in the Time-Life Building that Prince shifted from painting to photography, drawing inspiration from his work cutting out texts at the request of copywriters, and leaving behind advertising images.