I thought this was the end then it started over
interview by JEFF RIAN
portrait by SEBASTIAN PIRAS
All artworks courtesy of Richard Prince
For a number of years, Richard Prince lived in a small apartment on East 12th Street in New York City. He collected pulp fiction and the first editions he could afford. His artwork in the mid-’70s largely consisted of boxes of slides of ads and magazine pictures, which he reshot with Kodacolor film. He called them “rephotographs.” In the mid-’80s, he began to re-draw cartoons from magazines; he then made abstract paintings with jokes silkscreened onto them.
In the ’90s, Prince quickly became one of the most famous American artists, transforming American clichés — muscle cars, basketball hoops, cowboys, B-girls, jokes, celebrities, etc. — into artistic iconography. He made “appropriation” and picture recycling trendy. More recently, he’s recycled Instagram pictures of young girls having…