Long time readers would know that whilst the Big Lamington keeps its finger on the pulse of The Arts in Sydney that I have a very soft spot for Prince, Richard. I've said it
before that one of my all time favourite images is his untitled (Cowboy), of which both the AGNSW and
Patrick Bateman have a copy. Now for those that have come in late, or don't read the global arts press he has an amazing exhibition on right now at Gagosian in NY. I wish I was in town to see it in the flesh as, being a follower of Prince on both twitter and instagram, I have unwittingly been witnessing this exhibition come together. To avoid me having to give you all chapter and verse, go read Jerry Saltz's awesome review
here. Apart from being a top art critic, and personal friend of the Big Lamington, he is also a Prince fanboy so I share his views.
Prince has, for those that haven't worked it out. Taken appropriation to a whole new level in the iphone age. He started by just taking screen shots of peoples profiles on twitter. Then posting it as "Portrait of [ ]". Then he started finding images on instagram, adding comments under his own name, then taken screen shots of those posts. In his show at Gagosian he has printed out those screen shots on canvas. 163 x 124 cm canvasses. In other words BIG. To top it all off, when the exhibition went up, Prince deleted his instagram feed. What a marketer! Luckily the Big Lamington had been screenshotting in the background along the way, examples pictured above & below. Now one of the best bits of this show is the Gagosian press release which states "All images are subject to copyright. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction." Righto, gallery install view at bottom. I tweeted a sneaky pic of a Richard Prince canvas from his
Canal Zone show at Gagosian in May and got a great response tweet from artist - "I want to be a hypocrite". Love it. He deleted that tweet, but not before I took a screenshot. Canvasses available shortly ...
Points - Prince gets them all. Hey AGNSW, when are we bringing this genius out to Aus?
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