Good art has a perspective and Prince effectively communicated something about our culture that still resonates to this day. He has also proved he is more then a one trick pony of an artist and if you take a look at he work you can see he is also a prolific painter and sculptor.

http://www.harlanerskine.com/blog/2010/02/on-originality.html

Also, tonight Todd Walker (http://www.ocularoctopus.com/) and I will be hosting a tweetchat w/ guest David Bram @Dbram of @FractionMag, on influences & originality in photography for our biweekly tweetchat #artphotochat.

Join in tonight at 9 pm EST.

These Art Photography chats anyone can join in or just read it live by using the hashtag #photoartchat on Twitter. One easier way to transform twitter into a chat room is Tweetchat.com and entering the photoartchat room here: http://tweetchat.com/room/photoartchat.

a previous chat:
http://www.harlanerskine.com/blog/2009/12/tuesdays-art-photo-tweetchat-continuing.html

I think Mr Prince needs to find a new approach to his art that doesn’t involve stealing other’s hard work.

Yes, some may only know of Krantz through Prince, but those Marlboro ads are pretty famous on their own, Prince just seems to have interfered when it comes to that.
Maybe if he even bothered to find out who shot those photos and involved them in his art, Krantz may have had the exposure because of it that Prince had.

from Wiki:

“The subjects of Prince’s rephotographs are the photos of others. He is merely photographing the works of other photographers, who in the case of the cowboys, had been hired by Marlboro Cigarettes to create images depicting cowboys. Prince describes his process in a 2003 interview with Artforum International Magazine’s Steve Lafreiniere as, “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually I had no skills. I played the camera. I used a cheap commercial lab to blow up the pictures. I made editions of two. I never went into a darkroom.”[5]

Prince was a spectator to the imagery of others and decided to approach it in a new manner, interpret it in his own way, while challenging the socially accepted. Prince’s naivety to photography can potentially be accredited with the success of his earth shaking work. Just where do you draw the line as to what is a reflection of inspirational works and what is just down right thievery? But through his thievery he is creating something new, something Richard Prince. At the end of the day he is still dismantling the original, whether it is greatly noticeable or not”

Visual culture is evolving. This is neither the beginning, nor the end of appropriate usage disputes.

Ha. Are you insulting me now? Always a sign of a strong arguement, blind and unfounded attacks at those who disagree with you.

My point was just appropriation, or “STEALING” as you so boldly put it, has a long history in the art world. You don’t hear anyone crying foul that Picasso used a newspaper article of theirs to collage with, or the American government suing Jasper Johns for his use of the American flag.

At the Met a couple years ago I remember hearing a couple middle-aged, wealthy women digging into to the Prince debate with similar insight: “Ahh, it just STEALING! I don’t get it. He’s a plagiarist!” Ten seconds later they found themselves looking at a photos of the twin towers from 9/11 photographed off a computer screen from news footage. “Now THIS I like!”

- Leonardo Da Vinci
- Pablo Picasso
- Georges Braque
- Marcel Duchamp
- Any of those Dadaists or Surrealists
- Jasper Johns
- Roy Lichtenstein
- Andy Warhol
- Claus Oldenburg
- Jeff Koons
- Barbara Kruger

Oh the list goes on. What a bunch of hacks, seriously.

But we must also take into consideration the field in which Prince works as well as his intended audience. In the “A”rt world appropriation is a common practice that many artists engage in.

It could be argued that a work that utilizes an appropriated image is simply a response to the original, and in that response the original is quoted.