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Who’s Afraid of Richard Prince?: Towards Ugliness<br />
Genevieve Goffman<br />
Who’s Afraid<br />
of Richard<br />
Prince?<br />
Not me. I have nothing to be afraid<br />
of. I am not skinny enough, cool<br />
enough or successful enough. Plus<br />
I’m pretty sure that, at 24, I’m past<br />
my peak creep prime, at least from<br />
the perspective of 65-year-old<br />
Prince, who seems to run more in<br />
Terry Richardson’s line of thought.<br />
Why fear a body snatcher if you<br />
don’t have body worth snatching?<br />
That’s really all Prince is guilty of.<br />
And it’s not even an original crime.<br />
If you are not familiar with<br />
Richard Prince, he is an American<br />
appropriation artist who became<br />
well known in the 1980s for his<br />
project Cowboys, in which he rephotographs<br />
Marlboro Man advisements<br />
stripped of their branding.<br />
In this work, he was said to<br />
be questioning everything, from<br />
American masculinity to “what is<br />
real.” This work was followed by<br />
a collection called Girlfriends, in<br />
which he rephotographs pictures<br />
taken of bikers’ girlfriends sprawled<br />
out on bikes. So, other than a brief<br />
stint in 1985, when he turned his<br />
attention to painting mildly sexist<br />
jokes on canvas, Richard Prince<br />
has always been a body snatcher.<br />
Most recently, Richard Prince<br />
has caught a lot of flak, not for<br />
body snatching, but for “stealing”<br />
the photographs of Instagram users,<br />
printing them out and selling<br />
them for ridiculously high prices as<br />
part of a series of shows called New<br />
Portraits. The series consists of 37<br />
prints, and first opened for private<br />
viewing at the Gagosian Gallery<br />
in New York City in October of<br />
2014. Each print is a 65-by-48-<br />
inch screenshot that Prince took<br />
of someone else’s Instagram photo,<br />
always including an often mocking<br />
and nonsensical comment made<br />
by Prince himself. The photos are<br />
mostly of young, conventionally<br />
attractive women, many of them<br />
highly sexual, many of them selfies.<br />
Almost all of them are of highly<br />
successful Instagram users or celebrities,<br />
though some of them are<br />
celebrity fan accounts.<br />
Much of the critique of Prince<br />
so far has concerned his stealing<br />
photographs and making money<br />
off other people's work (although<br />
many have rightfully accused him<br />
of being a big old creep and making<br />
boring art). But it's not necessarily<br />
the photograph that Prince is<br />
profiting from. Instagram is made<br />
of photographs, but what powers<br />
it is bodies and aesthetics. Pho-
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