About the Work
Known for his "appropriation art" critiquing American culture, artist and collector Richard Prince began examining mainstream humor with his Moral Essays Portfolio in 1986 and continued to develop his Joke paintings, often paired with disparate images. His first joke, written in pencil on paper, said, "I went to see a psychiatrist. He said 'tell me everything,' I did, and now he's doing my act."
This joke, handwritten in ink is also about a psychiatrist: "The mother took her incorrigible son to the psychiatrist. 'Does he seem to feel insecure?' asked the doctor. 'No,' the mother replied, 'but everyone else in the neighborhood does.'" Prince makes no apology for reusing others' jokes, understanding that the nature of a joke is for it to be shared.
About the Artist
Rejecting the sentiment of the artist as the paragon of individualism, Richard Prince has been an "agent provocateur” in the art world since 1975 when he rephotographed an advertisement featuring the Marlboro Man, catalyzing an art-critical buzz around issues of appropriation, originality, and authorship. Prince's restless intellect and attention-grabbing use of appropriation art have earned him both celebrity and frequent legal problems. Yet he has continued to critique American culture by reframing its archetypes, icons, and myths and challenging consumer advertising, fame seeking, and mainstream humor.
Prince has worked in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, film, video, and photography, but he is also a writer of poetry and fiction. Some of his most famous works are his Nurse Paintings, inspired by pulp romance novels, one of which was featured on the Sonic Youth album Sonic Nurse, and which influenced Marc Jacobs's Spring 2008 collection for Louis Vuitton.
An avid collector of art, books, manuscripts, and odd objects like cancelled checks from celebrities, Prince has become the chronicler of a generation. On collecting, he says, "I don't see any difference now between what I collect and what I make. It’s become the same. What I’m collecting will, a lot of times, end up in my work." A major retrospective, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, was mounted in 2007 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
