Richard Prince v Suicide Girls in an Instagram price war

Founder Missy Suicide offers prints of Instagram posts for $90 after discovering versions by Richard Prince for sale at Frieze art fair for $90,000

Richard Prince’s New Portraits at the Gagosian gallery. The artist takes images from Instagram and prints them on canvas. Photograph: Rob McKeever/Gagosian

He’s appropriated images of American icons ranging from the Malboro man to Brooke Shields – and even once published The Catcher in the Rye with his name on the jacket instead of JD Salinger’s.

But 40 years into his career, Richard Prince’s practice of taking images from other sources without permission, changing them minimally (if at all), presenting them as his own work and selling them with a hefty price tag is still proving controversial.

The artist’s most recent works are screenshots from Instagram, blown up and jet-printed on six-foot canvas, the only other changes to the images being cryptic remarks by Prince added to the comment threads.

When Prince first presented the works at the Gagosian Gallery in New York last September, New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz described them as “genius trolling”, though others were less enthusiastic.

At the Frieze art fair this month, Prince presented a new set of Instagram pictures mainly taken from the feed belonging to SuicideGirls, a community of models and burlesque performers with a punk rock aesthetic.

One of the women in the photographs, Doe Deere, posted on Instagram that she had been told the picture of her had been sold for $90,000.

The owners of the images Prince has appropriated have occasionally sought legal redress. In 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou sued after Prince exhibited 35 images from his book Yes, Rasta, with additions to the pictures including splodges over the eyes and an electric guitar.

Though Prince was ordered to destroy the pictures, he won an appeal, with the court ruling that Cariou’s copyright had not been infringed.

Prince’s gallery sold one of the images for $2.5m.

Rather than sue, Suicide Girls founder Selena Mooney, known as Missy Suicide, has posted on the group’s website that she will sell prints of the images for $90, with proceeds going to charity. She wrote:

If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavour I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art. I was once really annoyed by Forever 21 selling shirts with our slightly altered images on them, but an artist?

Richard Prince is an artist and he found the images we and our girls publish on Instagram as representative of something worth commenting on, part of the zeitgeist, I guess? Thanks Richard!

In a post retweeted by Prince, she concluded: “Do we have Mr. Prince’s permission to sell these prints? We have the same permission from him that he had from us. ;)”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/27/suicide-girls-richard-prince-copying-instagram