Richard Prince Smells Bad

The Art of Photography

Ted Forbes

Diy, Art, Arts, Visual Arts, Image, Technology, Photography, Tv & Film, Culture, Tutorials, Gadgets, Photographers

4.5 • 942 Ratings

🗓️ 31 May 2015

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Richard Prince created quite a stir with his recent exhibition. Prince created a series of images that consisted of Instagram screenshots. Comprised mostly female “selfies” in somewhat suggestive poses, the images have slight alterations to what look like comments. These were printed large and displayed at Gagosian and Frieze. Photographers have every right to be upset over this, but everyone seems to have ignored the bigger issue – the work is bad. Yes, Appropriation art is a thing. But why does Shepard Fairey get a pass on the Obama “Hope” Poster? What makes Jeff Koons different? Didn’t Duchamp already do this with the toilet? What was so great about Andy Warhol’s soup can prints? Prince is recycling easy, overdone concept art. And when people get upset, they’re playing right into the concept.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody Ted Forbes welcome back to the art of photography.
0:03.2	In this video I want to talk about a subject that originally I was going to stay out of
0:06.8	just because it was talked about to death last week and I'm talking about the news and
0:10.1	events surrounding Richard Prince.
0:12.1	And if you're not familiar with the story I'll paraphrase it a bit
0:14.5	Richard Prince is a very well-known name in contemporary art. He's an artist who lives in
0:18.4	New York. Last year he did an exhibition for a gallery called Gogoshan. They repeated the exhibition this year at
0:24.0	Gogoshan and another gallery. And the exhibition consists of a series of works that Prince
0:29.2	made that are screenshots of random Instagram users and they're usually
0:35.0	selfies of women posed in somewhat suggested positions.
0:38.0	He would go through and change some of the comments up a little bit,
0:42.0	print these out fairly large and that
0:43.8	consisted the exhibition and these pieces were selling of upwards of 90 to
0:47.8	a hundred thousand dollars a piece and the backlash that came out of the
0:51.9	photography community was like nothing I'd ever seen.
0:55.0	This was reported everywhere.
0:56.6	And I think rightfully so, because as photographers, first of all, this centers around
1:00.5	Instagram, which is controversial enough.
1:03.0	A lot of people view Instagram as this thing
1:04.8	where everybody becomes an artist,
1:06.2	and that's already a little bit of a hot topic
1:08.3	with photographers who take their work seriously.
	...

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