Another artist who’s everywhere, but perhaps less popularly, is Richard Prince, whose screenshots of other people’s Instagrams are currently being sold for tens of thousands of dollars at his Gagosian show. Some of those people are now speaking out. As Artnet News reports, some see it as an honor because they’re being incorporated in the appropriation that’s defined Prince’s career for decades, while others, like 19-year-old ballet student Anna Collins, launch salient attacks at his “art”:
I just think about how I’m a working student in school, I’m extremely broke, and here is a middle-aged white man making a huge profit off of my image. Kind of makes me sick. I could use that money for my tuition.
To fight back, pinup photography website Suicide Girls — whose images were among those appropriated — has appropriated images of Prince’s appropriated images, and are selling them as posters (with their own captions below Prince’s, as Prince had done) for $90 — a 99.9% markdown. The proceeds are going to charity. The Creators Project spoke with Suicide Girls founder Missy Suicide about the project of charitable retaliation. Now, we can only hope that Prince doesn’t re-reappropriate these images, because a. that’d be petty and b. that’d be confusing.
And if all that doesn’t give you a bit of a gross and uncomfortable feeling, perhaps you should test your threshold for discomfort by moving in to Neverland Ranch. But if you’d rather get your discomfort through good literature than questionable art or mansions with loaded histories, allow Kelly Link to be your guide. Link, who recently released the collection Get in Trouble, and who is known for her playful and insinuatingly horrific banal-fantastical short stories, has picked this week’s “Recommended Reading” for Electric Literature. Link selected “The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter, for “the luster of Carter’s language; the tensile strength of the prose; its luscious, comical, fizzing theatricality.”