I wrote about artist Richard Prince‘s latest Instagram portraits last week, only guessing what they looked like. Well, here they are, thirty-seven of Prince’s portraits are now on view Larry Gagosian‘s Madison Avenue store, in their 4 x 6′ glossy glory. New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz has this to say;
“By using Instagram and tapping into these self-revealing, self-documenting subgroups, Prince has eliminated the mediating middleman of the professional or fashion photographer, the advertiser, the packager. With this level of artifice eliminated, the work is more intimate — and, to some, scary. Moreover, by adding his comments, he not only leaves tracks of evidence, he reincorporates language into his work. Instead of jokes, cartoon captions, and protest signs — all of which he has painted — Prince is the author of the writing, albeit in this highly unreliable guise. If this strikes people as perverted, then Prince has always been perverted, and no argument will convince the squeamish otherwise. Regardless, Prince’s new portraits number among the new art burning through the last layers that separate the digital and physical realms. They portend a merging more momentous than we know.”
To read Saltz’s full review of the work is to understand what Prince is doing and even understand art in the age we live in, just a little bit more.
