Richard Princes Instagrams - The New Yorker

4/28/15 8:41 PM

Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

Richard Princes Instagrams

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

VIEW FULL SCREEN

RICHARD PRINCE. COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT MCKEEVER.

A show at Gagosian of thirty-eight Instagrams harvested from the

Internet and inkjet-printed on canvas by the cynosure of appropriation,
Richard Prince, feels fated. The logic of artifying non-art images that
Andy Warhol inaugurated half a century ago could hardly skip a
burgeoning mass medium of individual self-exposure. Had Prince
uncharacteristically dozed, some other artist was going to notice that
Instagram recasts Andys proverbial fifteen minutes by urging everybody
to be famous fifteen times a day.
The subjects include the generally known (Kate Moss), the semi-known
(the art dealer Tony Shafrazi), and unknown (until now) folks advertising
themselves in racy selfies or in a type of portrait that might be termed the
assisted selfie. Reproduced bits of comment threads tend toward the
slangy and the salacious. Lets hook up next week. Lunch, Smiles, Prince
responds to a voluptuous Pamela Anderson. The ruling principle is one of
reciprocal obsession in sallies of boundary-free intimacy that are either real
or make-believe, and absent any way to tell the difference.
Is it art? Of course its art, though by a well-worn Warholian formula: the
subjective objectified and the ephemeral iconized, in forms that appear to
insult but actually conserve conventions of fine art. Princes rendition of a
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-princes-instagrams

Page 1 of 2

Richard Princes Instagrams - The New Yorker

4/28/15 8:41 PM

tattooed lass who styles herself nightcoregirl, sticking out her remarkably
long tongue, may not rival a Rembrandt self-portrait for the worlds
esteem, but it is quite as soundly a complex and integral portrayal on
stretched canvas. If youre sensitive to pictorial aesthetics, the look of the
thing will engage you, albeit perhaps very, very briefly.
Possible cogent responses to the show include naughty delight and sincere
abhorrence. My own was something like a wish to be deadwhich, say
what you want about it, is the surest defense against assaults of
postmodernist attitude. Come to think of it, death provides an apt
metaphor for the pictures: memento mori of perishing vanity. Another is
celestial: a meteor shower of privacies being burnt to cinders in the
atmosphere of publicity. They fall into contemporary famea sea that is a
millimetre deep and horizon-wide.
You neednt visit the show to absorb its lessons about the contagion of
social networks. But theres a bonus to viewing the images as material
stock in trade, destined for collections in which they will afford chic
shocks amid somewhat subtler embodiments of the human spirit. They
add a layer of commercial potency to the insatiable itchto know oneself
as knownthat has made Instagram a stupefying success.

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998
and is the magazines art critic.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-princes-instagrams

Page 2 of 2