Richard Prince (b.1949) emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists working with the margins of America's subcultures and visual debris. The appropriation and re-presentation of highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, off-colour cartoons, cowboys ('borrowed' from Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are essential to his work.
In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, where he had access to thousands of cut-up magazines in which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar imagery, updating 1960s Pop art's homage to consumerism and its icons. Decades later, his career took an unexpected turn, and the artist emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and intensely admired works in the current painting scene.
Prince is one of America's best known artists and in 1992 was honoured with a one-person retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other museums that have held solo shows of Prince's work include the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, IVAM in Valencia and the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Prince's highly readable Interview with Jeff Rian ranges in its subject matter from rock and roll to folk art, from criminals to celebrities, as well as his experiences and history as an artist. In her Survey, Rosetta Brooks examines the variety in Prince's art through two key themes: the notion of artistic authenticity and the artist's construction of his own beguiling personality. Renowned photography critic Luc Sante takes a close look at one of Prince's best known and most disturbing series, Girlfriends, a confounding combination of sexiness and sexism. For his Artist's Choice Prince has selected the lyrics from "Fallen for You", a 1992 pop song by singer/songwriter Sheila Nicholls. Prince's signature laconic writing style is represented by autobiography, fiction, observations and confessions.
Rosetta Brooks is an art critic and curator based in Pioneertown , California. She is currently a Core Faculty member of the MA in Art Criticism and Cultural Theory at the Art Center, College of Design, Pasadena, California. Formerly editor of the London-based ZG magazine, Brooks edited Richard Prince's 1992 catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has written extensively on such artists as Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke and Victor Burgin.
Jeff Rian is a writer and Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nīmes. He is an editor of Purple magazine, a regular contributor to Artforum and the author of Buckshot Lexicon (2000) and Lewis Baltz (Phaidon, 2001).
Luc Sante is the author of Low Life (1991), Evidence (1992), The Factory of Facts (1998) and Walker Evans (Phaidon, 2001), and co-editor of OK You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1999). He teaches Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
