Richard Prince Instagram Art Show

About

Richard Prince’s Instagram Art Show was an exhibition by American visual artist Richard Prince at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City which featured images the artist had appropriated from various users of Instagram and printed directly onto a canvas with the last comment appearing to be one from the artist. The artworks were criticized for their source, most of whom were not made aware that Prince had used their photos for his artworks before the works were hung and sold.

Background

Richard Prince (b. 1949) is a prominent American painter and photographer who began working with appropriated images in 1975.^[1] His work belongs to several museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is well known for rephotographing famous photographs, including many of celebrities and public figures.

On September 19th, 2014, a new show of Prince’s work opened at Manhattan’s Gagosian Gallery store, featuring photos the artist had found on Instagram, commented on, and then digitally printed onto large canvases. The subjects of the photographs and the Instagram account owners were not informed that Prince had printed out the photographs to display, although he had left his mark on the photographs with the addition of his comment. ^[2]

Reviews of show were mixed. Hyperallergic called it “cheap and underwhelming”^[3] while Jerry Saltz, the prominent New York Magazine art critic, praised it as “genius trolling.”^[4] The New York Post reported that many of the pieces had sold for more than $100,000. ^[5]

Notable Developments

Frieze Art Fair Display and Controversy

While the artworks sparked some initial controversy when they were first displayed, the uproar was reignited in May of 2015 after they were re-displayed by Gagosian Gallery at New York City’s Frieze Art Fair. On May 20th, 2015, One of the Instagrammers featured in the show, a dollmaker named Doe Deere, uploaded a picture of the Frieze Gagosian booth that featured the photo Prince had appropriated of her^[7] and wrote:

Figured I might as well post this because everyone is texting me. Yes, my portrait is currently displayed at the Frieze Gallery in NYC. Yes, it’s just a screenshot (not a painting) of my original post. No, I did not give my permission and yes, the controversial artist Richard Prince put it up anyway. It’s already sold ($90K I’ve been told) during the VIP preview. No, I’m not gonna go after him. And nope, I have no idea who ended up with it!

Photography news website PetaPixel wrote about DoeDeere’s Instagram reaction May 21st, and throughout the following week the story of the Instagram photos was revisited by The Washington Post, Fox News, and the Daily Mail.

Suicide Girls Resell their Photos

On May 27th, 2015, the online pornography company Suicide Girls, whose Instagram photo had been used by Prince in the exhibition, announced that it was selling prints of the photo Prince had displayed for $90 each, and donating the proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Founder Missy Suicide wrote on her blog “Do we have Mr. Prince’s permission to sell these prints? We have the same permission from him that he had from us. ;)”^[8]