{"id":7467,"date":"2016-04-27T10:31:40","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T17:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7467"},"modified":"2016-05-20T10:39:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T17:39:05","slug":"coolest-artist-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/04\/27\/coolest-artist-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Prince: Coolest Artist In The World"},"content":{"rendered":"

from VULTURE<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

RICHARD PRINCE\u00a0ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE COOLEST ARTIST IN THE WORLD<\/h1>\n

\"PrinceR\"<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not a responsible person, you know \u2014 at all,\u201d says Richard Prince, as if he is trying to remind himself of this as much as anything. \u201cI\u2019m just \u2014 I want to make cool shit. I want to be a cool dude, or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, at 66, Prince is one of the most successful and influential artists of his generation \u2014 specifically, the Pictures Generation, an aloof clique of 1980s conceptualists that included Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman (whom he used to date), who together reintroduced pictorial imagery to painting, in large part by borrowing it directly from advertising and mass culture. In music they call this \u201csampling,\u201d and for Prince it started with his reshooting magazine ads with the logos of the products cropped out (he was working at Time Inc. and became fascinated by Marlboro cowboys). This new art was considered, at the time, a kind of critique of the aspirations advertising saddles us with. Some of the images, which Prince describes as \u201ctoo good to be true,\u201d were cropped or repeated, others simply held up, by Prince, for closer inspection. And the inspection could be lusty, especially when the images were icons of swaggering Americana. Recently, trying to explain the process, he wrote on\u00a0his website<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s like sometimes I feel I\u2019m fucking what I\u2019m looking at.\u201d His most memorable work is still a photograph he took of a\u00a0photo of a 10-year-old Brooke Shields<\/a>, standing naked in a tub, shrouded in steam, her hair and face made up, her body oiled like some ancient-days courtesan, which a photographer named Gary Gross had taken at Shields\u2019s mother\u2019s own behest.<\/p>\n

Prince called his version\u00a0Spiritual America,<\/i>\u00a0a name that was also an appropriation \u2014 the title belonged to Alfred Stieglitz\u2019s close-up of the genitals of a castrated male horse \u00a0\u2014and showed it in a gaudy frame in a small, semi-anonymous gallery he opened in a storefront on then-ragged Rivington Street in 1983, called Spiritual America too. At the time, some people compared it to a peep show, but what he had really done was create a semi-furtive place where prurient interest would be given an avant-garde alibi. The gallery kept irregular hours to keep out outsiders, which might not have been simple showmanship. In 2009, well after Prince had become famous, the work was removed from an exhibition at the Tate Modern by the police, who explained they wanted the museum to \u201cnot inadvertently break the law or cause any offense to their visitors.\u201d Today,\u00a0Spiritual America\u00a0<\/i>belongs to the Whitney, but you can\u2019t look at it on its website \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s hidden<\/a>\u00a0behind a large gray\u00a0X<\/i>.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at VULTURE<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from VULTURE RICHARD PRINCE\u00a0ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE COOLEST ARTIST IN THE WORLD \u201cI\u2019m not a responsible person, you know \u2014 at all,\u201d says Richard Prince, as if he is trying to remind himself of this as much as anything. \u201cI\u2019m just \u2014 I want to make cool shit. I want to be a cool […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}