Some subjects in Richard Prince’s Instagram show don’t mind that their photos have been appropriated or that Prince makes leering comments. So says young conceptual artist Erika Blair in her Art Blog Art Blog response to my artnet News slam of the Richard Prince Instagram show at Gagosian. (She’s not actually in this show but has had her portrait turned into a canvas). She complains that while Prince indeed makes leering comments, she should not have been lumped into a group of women portrayed as what she describes “a social media damsel in distress.”
Yes, I was very aware that Prince was looking. And I enjoyed it. We have had many short conversations through Instagram comment sections…I was neither timid nor helpless when responding to his sometimes snarky comments. And I was fully aware that this could be another joke of Prince’s, concealed behind the guise that I was really “connecting” with an artist I have always admired.
Blair makes a good point. The article I wrote should have included a line that imagined more than one type of response to Prince’s comments. Some weird assumptions follow from that omission though; that I would be “dismayed” to learn that “women can be voyeuristic perverts”, that I am shocked by Prince’s mere use of Instagram.
Um, no. The point of that review was not to suggest that all women must not welcome Prince’s advances, but rather that the women in these photos don’t have their own point of views expressed. I want women to be able to express their views and desires—whatever they are—and Prince removed that. In the Instagram captions, no exchange is reproduced, just a series of random comments that end with his own. As for Prince’s choice of medium—who cares what he chooses so long as he does something remotely interesting with it. Reproducing a bunch of portraits with his own vapid commentary isn’t that.
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Female chauvinist pigs?
Cool girls?
“I’m-cool-because-I’m-in-with-your-joke” girls?
“You-were-the-one-who-actually-got-punked” girls?
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