If we are to believe the Telegraph, Richard Prince is an artist:
Though it isn’t immediately obvious when you look at his work, the American artist Richard Prince has built up a hugely successful career by elaborating and refining ideas first explored by Andy Warhol. Take, for example, one of Prince’s best-known works, the 1989 Ektacolor photo of a cowboy galloping under blue skies across a wide open plain with a lariat in one hand, horse and rider caught in the split second before they thunder out of the camera’s range.
Okay, so far, so good. It’s the Marlboro advert, in case you were wondering.
In fact, what Prince did was to “re-photograph” an advertisement for Marlboro Lights, but removed the picture of the cigarette pack, the advertising copy (“The spirit of Marlboro in a low tar cigarette”), and the Surgeon General’s health warning.
With a click of a button, then, Prince magically created an original artwork out of an existing photo taken by somebody else.
You what? Let’s get this straight. He has photographed someone else’s work and presented it as his own. This is not art, this is plagiarism. Photo-shopping out the Marlboro packet doesn’t make one an artist. Pinching someone else’s photograph doesn’t make you an artist (even if you have paid for the original).
By then blowing the photo up to gallery size, he makes us see both how carefully staged and how stunningly beautiful the original image was – something impossible to appreciate when flipping through the pages of a magazine.
Indeed it is a beautiful image. An image that someone else created.
And so, Prince’s doctored photo isn’t about the West or even about selling you something: it is about how the advertising industry has hijacked an American myth (the cowboy legend created by the dime novel and Hollywood) to sell cigarettes.
No, it’s about Prince copying someone else’s work and passing it off as his own. This is not clever, it is not iconic, it is not talented and it is not delivering a message. Most of all, it is not art. It is the most blatant plagiarism.
The article goes on with the usual pseudo-intellectual bollocks about meaning and such guff that would fit snugly in Private Eye’s pseuds corner, so utterly pretentious is it. These days anything can pass as art (you only have to look at the Turner prize entries or think of Tracey Emin – or not, if you prefer) and any pretentious fuckwit can wax lyrical about its meaning. Ultimately, this image is still copying someone else’s work. The real artist here is the original photographer.
Not even the original photographer is an “artist”: he is, though, a superb craftsman. The “artist” or rather the “con-artists” are Prince himself and Richard Dorment – the writer of the piece in the Telegraph. To be fair though, Dorment doesn’t think much of Prince and labels him a pale shadow of Warhol.
Of course, Dorment (together with the coterie of critics) buys into the whole “artist” con-trick of the 20th century ie that anything labelled “art” (by the in-group of art cognoscenti) is art. An analogous “manifest crap converted to gold by cognoscenti” con-trick is the notion that rubbish academics at the Institute of Education in London together with innumerable “professors” of education at jumped up technical colleges all over the UK define what “education” really is.
I am one of those who regards photography as both an art form and a craft. It depends a great deal on the subject matter. In this instance, the craft produced a picture that I would happily hang on my wall – for me, that makes it art. There is craft in depth of field, choice of shutter speed and aperture. The art is in the composition and deciding what lighting best suits the subject. This is sometimes referred to as having an eye for a picture. Therein lies the difference between the craftsman and the artist.
That said, yes, I concur with your point. Frankly, the nonsense spouted by these people who tell us that the likes of Damian Hurst and Tracey Emin are producing art is an insult to those talented artists who can really produce works of art.
LR
You’re right, of course, that photography can be both craft and art. It’s interesting where exactly – in the particular case of the original photograph – craft tips over into art. This is not the place for a philosophical discussion although Kant had much to say on the subject. My philosophy education (such as it is) is now receding into the mists of time but I believe that none of the great philosophers would have agreed that just the act of proclaiming something as “art” makes it art.
However, since your photographer-craftsman has – for you – created something with a deeper truth which is apparent to you, then – for you – it is art. What grates is the notion that any old crap (unmade beds, sheep in preservative) masquerading as “art” is accepted as such by the Art Section of the Political Class partly because a rich and mischievous businessman decides to sponsor and/or cough up real money on these works. Worse, our tax money is then diverted by that same group into supporting the creators of this guff: Nicholas Serota please take a bow!
Oh absolutely. My yardstick is the “hang it on my wall test”. If I wouldn’t give it house room; it ain’t art. A crude measure, to be sure, but one most rational people would recognise.
Turner? Yes. Constable? Yes. The impressionists? Yes. Brit Art? You’ve got to be joking.
As an aside, when out and about taking landscapes, I try to make them aesthetically pleasing – in other words, I am trying to produce art. Sometimes, I succeed, sometimes, I don’t. But – unlike Prince, it is my work.
“By then blowing the photo up to gallery size, he makes us see both how carefully staged […] the original image was.”
Yep. Although, of course, at the time of the stereotypical cowboy, smoking was far more prevalent and so he was very likely to be in possession of a packet of cigarettes.
DK
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