Richard Prince

Barabara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Europe
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 15 November 2007, Lot 416
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original, and the illustration fails to convey fully the reflective silver outlines of the letters. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a minute indentation to the extreme overturn of the bottom centre edge, and a very small number of extremely short and thin hairline drying cracks in one or two isolated areas in the thickest imapsto, which are inherent to the nature of the medium. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

When Richard Prince first exhibited his ongoing series of Joke Paintings in the late 1980s, these now iconic paintings were deemed iconoclastic, shocking the art world by posing an outright challenge to received ideas about authorship and originality in art. To sympathisers of conceptual and appropriation art, however, they were seen as a cool antidote to the excesses of the Neo Expressionist painting that was being championed by New York's SoHo galleries. As Nancy Spector explains, the early pared-down, monochrome Joke Paintings were "Matter of fact, tactless and funny, these handwritten gags were the antithesis of the pseudo-expressionistic painting and sculpture being produced at the time" (Nancy Spector, 'Nowhere Man' in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Richard Prince, 2007-08, p. 37).

Untitled, from 2001, shows how the original concept of the Joke Paintings evolved over the following decade. No longer seen as an affront to art history, these paintings had by the Twenty-first Century merited their own place within the Western canon. For Prince, the joke itself becomes an artistic trope, the text itself provides both the subject and formal architecture for painting, just as the target or American flag provided Jasper Johns with an arena for Abstract Expressionist mark-making. Ironically, by 2001 and the present work in particular, Prince's Joke Paintings have come full circle and Untitled is marked out by the brushy, dripping application of the acrylic and the gestural swathes of colour that run into one another. Gone is the sterility and conceptual purity of the silkscreened monochrome in favour of an unabashedly expressive application of paint which is a direct forerunner of the series of Nurse paintings started in 2004.

Prince began the series on an extended visit to Los Angeles in 1987, by selecting jokes and silk-screening them onto uninflected planes of colour. Like his early pirated photographs, the jokes were culled from the popular press, revealing Prince's avid fascination for the low-brow and the kitsch. The corny gags are a natural continuation of Prince's interest in generic advertisements and biker girlfriends, only here his pictorial strategy is reversed. While in his photographs of Cowboys the sense of the image is radically altered by removing the branding and text, here, by contrast, the image is pared down completely to leave only text. Despite their ostensible simplicity, the comic one-liners in fact belie a sophisticated and well-considered gag, submitted for publication by an anonymous writer and selected from the thousands by the editorial committee of a newspaper or trashy magazine. Like advertising, these jokes that enter the public sphere reflect a certain collusion of public taste, desires and prejudices. Just as the New York Times aligns its cartoons with the tenor of the time, these deceptively simple jokes speak volumes about the cultural epoch of which they are borne. Often vaudeville, rapid-fire humour, the banality of Prince's jokes, emancipated from their signifying context, reveals the essence of the American psyche. At the same time, these unattributed and unascribed quips, quoted without license and represented in a matter-of-fact manner, make a damning indictment of the notions of authorship and originality that the art world holds sacrosanct. In an extension of the Duchampian readymade, Prince's blatant piracy revolutionises entrenched ideals of intellectual property.

Ironically, of course, this gesture of protest has come to be regarded today as a masterstroke of genius by the very same critics and collectors that Prince's dead-pan paintings sought to defy. Above all, Prince's art is one of cultural quotation. Like a modern day flaneur, he identifies the most revealing aspects of our modern, consumer-driven psyche and exposes them to our scrutiny.