ART
The Programmatic Premlinary Proud Difficulties with Richard Prince
/ Darren Bader
10.03.07
Richard Prince
Spiritual America
The Guggenheim Musuem
September 28th - January 9th
I.
One owns a wall. One is chosen by the wall. These are two givens, of many. Each could be conferred and/or confirmed as art. Art in the way we come to know it in the biased sense: the visual arts/ bourgeois decoration/ bourgeois creation-individuation. So assumes the place—indeed the strict locus—of one Richard Prince, artist par excellence.
II.
The venerable New York Guggenheim has under the co-liegemanship of staff curator Nancy Spector and Richard Prince himself been ushered to house a Prince retrospective fancifully/appositely named Spiritual America.
III.
“The Collection of the Artist”. This is what a great many placards read in Spiritual America. This would suggest one of two things:
1. an artist intimately calculating his legacy (because he believes-in [alternatively, adheres-to] art historical logic) [Richard Serra played this card @ MOMA this summer].
2. an artist loath to sell cherished works due to an ambivalent relationship with commerce vis-à-vis artistic output.
IV.
Prince is most famous for his appropriation of photographic entities found in mass produced magazines. He has a gland that processes what many less-glanded people fail to process: a conscious recognition of the profane genius, or imperious seductions that go into advertising, towards announcing an artifact. He takes pictures of existing mass-produced pictures, cropping them as he sees aesthetically-cum-conceptually fit. Hence we are reacquainted with living-room interiors, jewelry/timepiece-type accessories, comely women and men, and cowboys. The cowboys come from Marlboro ads no-duh. The provenance of the other subjects is less clear (at least for a person of my vintage).
Spiritual America
The Guggenheim Musuem
September 28th - January 9th
I.
One owns a wall. One is chosen by the wall. These are two givens, of many. Each could be conferred and/or confirmed as art. Art in the way we come to know it in the biased sense: the visual arts/ bourgeois decoration/ bourgeois creation-individuation. So assumes the place—indeed the strict locus—of one Richard Prince, artist par excellence.
II.
The venerable New York Guggenheim has under the co-liegemanship of staff curator Nancy Spector and Richard Prince himself been ushered to house a Prince retrospective fancifully/appositely named Spiritual America.
III.
“The Collection of the Artist”. This is what a great many placards read in Spiritual America. This would suggest one of two things:
1. an artist intimately calculating his legacy (because he believes-in [alternatively, adheres-to] art historical logic) [Richard Serra played this card @ MOMA this summer].
2. an artist loath to sell cherished works due to an ambivalent relationship with commerce vis-à-vis artistic output.
IV.
Prince is most famous for his appropriation of photographic entities found in mass produced magazines. He has a gland that processes what many less-glanded people fail to process: a conscious recognition of the profane genius, or imperious seductions that go into advertising, towards announcing an artifact. He takes pictures of existing mass-produced pictures, cropping them as he sees aesthetically-cum-conceptually fit. Hence we are reacquainted with living-room interiors, jewelry/timepiece-type accessories, comely women and men, and cowboys. The cowboys come from Marlboro ads no-duh. The provenance of the other subjects is less clear (at least for a person of my vintage).