The show pairs two artists — one Black, one white — who have trained their vision for decades on both the US’s foundational violences and its rarer, complicated moments of beauty, through strategies of appropriation. Taken together, their work becomes a bracing indictment-slash-love letter to a deeply flawed nation.
But to my mind, what makes the exhibition even more quintessentially American is the fact that the curator seems — almost perversely — unable to face (or at least name) the racial implications of her own curatorial conceit.
D’Souza gets at the heart of what I’ve sensed about the show [from afar so far] but couldn’t articulate so well: that it doesn’t quite have a handle on what Jafa and Prince are actually doing as their work conveys the experiences of, respectively, Black and white culture.
Also, it still seems buck wild to me that this supposed powerful reckoning of The Real American Pavilion is happening at the Prada Foundation. Also, it still feels to me that a show titled Helter Skelter should have Cady Noland in it, and while I’m thinking about it, a Noland/Jafa show is something I would like to see.
Medusa, 2003, Barbara Gladstone’s own Richard Prince car hood, 62 x 45 x 5 1/2 in., selling at Sotheby’s
I’m scrolling through the Sotheby’s sale of furniture from Barbara Gladstone’s well-appointed home and wondering why there’s so much art mixed in. Was there concern that some art might attract less attention in a design auction? Or was it the other way around? Were there so many artist-designed furniture objects, that they made sure to add some art art objects so art art collectors didn’t miss the sale?
Franz West, INRI, 1991, wood, gauze & plaster, 101 3/4 x 64 1/4 x 9 1/2 in., from Barbara Gladstone’s own sanctuary, being rendered unto Caesar at Sotheby’s
Whatever it is, it includes Franz West’s table & chairs, perhaps the most collectible thing from his Hamsterwheel installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale. [Also this buck wild, 10-foot tall cross, for the Franz West true believer.]
Christopher Wool, New Linen, 2012, hand-dyed silk carpet, 119 by 97.5 in., ed 3/15, walked on by the conservation-minded Barbara Gladstone, now selling at Sotheby’s
Scott Burton, Cafe Table II, 1987, violetta calcutta, absolute black granite, 28 ⅝ by 29 ⅝ by 15 ⅞ in., ed 4/10, from under the cocktail glass of Barbara Gladstone, selling at Sotheby’s
Actually, that was like the second thought I had. The first thought was that Barbara bought this 1987 Burton table from Andrew Kreps in 2011? MoMA could really do a lot worse than having a dealer like Kreps take over the Scott Burton estate.
Whether for utility or poetry, the alt text has not sunk into the lower layers of Gagosian Quarterly. Editor Wyatt Allgeier’s interview with Nancy Spector about her Arthur Jafa/Richard Prince show, “Helter Skelter” has exactly one image with an alt tag. The rest are from the related articles links in the footer:
Video still of orange, glowing orb against black background
Richard Prince, Untitled and Untitled (Ulysses), 2011, at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2014, photos: Rudolf Sagmeister and Dietrich Gehring, via Contemporary Art Daily
Talking this morning with Matt, our book man in Venice, about the intense passions of collectors of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he reminded me that Richard Prince’s own bibliophilia covered Ulysses, too.
In Prince’s birdtalk texts from 2014, there’s a bit about yearning for the copy Joyce inscribed to Ezra Pound. And another about going to Dijon to see where Ulysses was first printed, and hunting down the Greek flag blue that appeared on the cover of the 1st edition.
Which was the same moment Prince opened It’s A Free Concert, a show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, which included a large, book cover lithograph-shaped monochrome diptych, Untitled (Ulysses), in Joyce’s—and Greece’s—blue. It’s dated 2011, so he’d had it on his mind for a while.
The brochure is tall. If there were any plebeians in Venice rn, the show would open for them Saturday
I have read the gallery guide for Helter Skelter Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Miuccia Prada’s two-artist show curated by Nancy Spector. I have created a mind palace and walked through it. I’m not sure these artists are operating on the same register.
The exhibition segregates them on the ground floor, and they get together in the fancy rooms upstairs. Spector notes shared ideas, themes, visuals, approaches, without forcing too hard. It feels more like parallel play than direct engagement or dialogue. [Which makes me very interested to see what Jafa and Prince’s collaborative zine ends up like; it could be the song of the summer.]
The image used to promote the show feels like its apotheosis. Prince’s iconic Rasta painting, Graduation (2008) and a Vodoun witch doctor from Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio (2019) are shown side by side, along with two other Canal Zone paintings, near the end of the show. In the text, Spector focuses on appropriation and juxtaposition, and Jafa’s critique of ownership in the historical context of chattel slavery.
[top] Arthur Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio, 2019, at Museum Brandhorst… cropped and combined [bottom] with Richard Prince’s Graduation, 2008, for the Prada Foundation show.
But the elision of Mickey Mouse feels crucial. Jafa has talked about how placing their images next to each other reveal Mickey and Damballah, the Vodoun spirit represented by the witch doctor, are two iterations of the same entity. Placing a whiteface figure next to Prince’s Rasta says blackface, without the hard “R.” But hanging Mickey next to Graduation brings out the minstrel in both.
The autobiography of desire echoes throughout the show, with each artist exploring the yearning of being someone else, an other. Prince made his Girlfriends photos because he “wanted to be a girlfriend.” And Jafa’s Man-Monster self-portrait embodies transformation in ways that resonate with his 2024 race-switching re-edit of Taxi Driver, BG, which in Venice is titled Ben Gazarra [is the misspelling intentional?].
installation view of Helter Skelter so that Mickey’s cropped out again, but that surprised Mickey face-like group of ovals isn’t. image: Fond. Prada via hypebeast, which I only read for the google images
What’s less clear, perhaps, in the show is that Prince testified that painting Rastas was an act of love, of desire, of substitution like the Girlfriends: he wanted to look like them, to be them. For all the real talk of the Black experience, white supremacy, and American masculinity, I feel like both of these artists are mapping the psychosexual contours of a violent, white, imperialist, colonialist elephant, while Spector and Prada are maybe saying, keep the blindfolds on.
Richard Prince, Eden Rock, 2005-06, eighteen acrylic on canvas, each 24 x 30 in., at Christie’s
The Edlis Neesons are selling a set of eighteen Richard Prince Eden Rock paintings at Christie’s. They’re overpainted appropriations of the covers of a pulp sci-fi book series called Deathlands, sort of butched up, post-apocalyptic nurse paintings. But greg.org readers may know them for their starring role in Eden Rock: The Movie, Prince’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi concept set in St. Bart’s. These Deathlands paintings were one tribe in Eden Rock; the Canal Zone Rastas were another; and the pin-up girls (from a Taschen book) scattered throughout the Canal Zone paintings were a third. [Fun fact: Eden Rock was the movie/pitch. Prince’s working title for these paintings, which read somewhere between a moodboard and a storyboard, was In My Movie.]
Three of Edlis/Neeson’s paintings were begun in 2005, and all were completed in 2006. Of those three, this one with the skull has the lowest inventory number, so maybe it was first? Prince was on it for a while, though; sixteen 0thers in the series that Prince showed at the actual Eden Rock Hotel over Christmas/New Year’s 2007-08 were listed as 2006-07. [FWIW, in an Eden Rock inventory filed in the Cariou trial, the walk-in price was $150,000, and all sixteen had buyers listed. At least one re-sold—maybe by David Ganek—for $87,500 in 2020. Christie’s estimates the Edlis Neesons’ set at $500-700,000.]
Deathlands 45, Starfall, cover
I thought that Canal Zone connection would be the most interesting thing about these paintings, but I’m turning out to be wrong. From the low-res images I’d seen, I’d always assumed these were paint-for-hire copies of the covers, which he then whited out by hand. But they’re stroke-for-stroke matches, which means they’d have to be inkjets. Except unlike the nurse paintings, they’re listed only as acrylic, and they’re on pre-stretched canvases. Also, Prince’s painting contains elements cropped from the cover. So either Prince extrapolated, or he was working from the original painting. Around the same time, Prince created a series called Untitled (Originals), which paired a pulp novel with its original cover art. Maybe the Eden Rock paintings are similar. In any case, they may not be what they say, and they are definitely not what they seem.
One thing I love about this edition [which greg.org hero Matt tipped me off about] in Glenn Ligon’s new show of works on paper at Hauser & Wirth , is that Ligon did not use the digital image of the 1989 study from Punchlines, Sotheby’s themed online sale of Richard Prince jokes in December 2023 as the base for his hand-drawn redactions.
Richard Prince, Untitled (Study for Joke Painting), 1989, ballpoint pen, tape and printed paper on paper, 12 by 9 in., sold at Sotheby’s 15 Dec 2023 for $7,620
Ligon’s image of Prince’s printed, clipped, annotated, taped, three-layer study has different shadows along the edges of the collage, so a different lighting situation than when Sotheby’s photographed it. Did Ligon photograph it while on view? Did he buy it? That would be some praxis. [And with an edition of 25, a great ROI.]
The dimensions of Ligon’s edition and Prince’s study are identical—and I love how Ligon signs his in a way that echoes Prince. But that’s just the dimension of the sheet; in fact, Ligon is presenting his work, Punchline (2024), in an identical frame, too. The facsimile objecthood is strong with this one.
Except, of course, Ligon’s intervention completely transforms the work. It’s not that his crossouts eliminate the rape and racist jokes; you can still make them out, if you’re determined to. But he changes entirely the delivery and impact of the punchline [sic], which is not, of course, much of a punchline at all.
When I went looking to see if Prince ever made a painting with this double joke printed 16 inches wide, I didn’t find one. But I did find one of Prince’s joke sources: The Official Black Joke Book/The Official White Joke Book, a 1975 addition to a long series of Official [Some Target Group] Joke Books by Larry Wilde. [So far, the text of the hippie hitchhiker joke does not appear anywhere online outside of Prince’s own oeuvre.]
Ligon recomposes the text, but also reauthors it in ways that matter, and that highlight the mechanisms of appropriation. In his Cariou deposition Prince talks about wanting “to be a girlfriend,” wanting dreads and to be a Rasta he saw at a bar in St. Barth. And when he can’t, he says, “Maybe I should paint them. Maybe that’s a way to substitute that desire.” Now there’s a thread to pull on, which runs through Prince’s work, but also through the white male gaze culture he was soaking in and drawing from.
Text, appropriation, painting, history, racialized experience, queerness. This one print has me questioning whose tools are being used here, whose house is being dismantled, and what’s being built in its place. I’m not sure there’s another artist working now who could make so little into so much.
Photograph after Glenn Ligon (Double America, 2012, 36 x 120 in.), 2016, Diasec flush-mounted, 44 x 129 in. sold from the Estate of Chara Schreyer in 2023. Were the power cables photoshopped out, or did Schreyer have them hidden in the wall?
I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.
But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.
NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.
Jenny Holzer, THE FUTURE IS STUPID panty hose, 1993, for the AmFAR X Barneys Art Object collection, via WrongAnswer.ca
Geoff Snack posted this unopened pair of Jenny Holzer panty hose to WrongAnswer this morning, and now they’re gone. Of all the artist-designed clothing editions in the 1993 AmFAR Art Object collaboration with Barneys, I think the Jenny Holzer panty hose are the most vulnerable.
Richard Prince, joke shirt, ed. 150, 1993, embroidery on cotton, Art Object for AmFAR & Barney’s [sold] via Bengtsson Fine Arts
Kenny Scharf has the Art Object print ad [pdf] listing all 19 artist collabs, and honestly Prada making a JSG Boggs backpack is an even wilder combo than Frette making Scharf’s napkins. What a world. [see below]
[NEXT MORNING UPDATE] So a pair sold on eBay YESTERDAY. There were Jenny Holzer panty hose at Printed Matter. I mentioned them to a friend just now, and he was all, “Hah, yeah, I remember them from Barneys. AmFAR. I had some and sold them.” So while until yesterday I thought I’d been living in a world oblivious to Jenny Holzer AIDS fundraiser panty hose, I was actually living in a world where everyone around me knew about Jenny Holzer panty hose AND DIDN’T TELL ME.
several interviews—the most Prince has said in years without being put under oath; a tour of a sprawling, sculpture-studded compound in Rensellaerville, NY which Larry calls Richardville, the hub of the Prince Cinematic Universe; and the blazing hot core exchange from Deposition, the seven-hour video epic that played in Rome this summer—which is also a best-selling book, of course, find it at a Harlem parking lot near you—and a preview of Prince’s new paintings, which will be shown next month at Gagosian. Oh, and photos by Taryn Simon!
Screenshot from 2023, when Richard Prince’s second deposition was streaming at depositionrow.com
Since Richard Prince’s video recording of his 2018 deposition in the McNatt & Graham lawsuits briefly surfaced online in 2023 until it was screened at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis as a work, Deposition (2025), it feels like the number of people who have watched the full 7-hour thing would not have filled the smallest theater at the Quad Cinema.
If you’re not going to watch it—again, it’s almost seven hours of Richard Prince talking extremely slowly in an adversarial conversation with offscreen lawyers—Russeth’s take and highlights will get you the gist. And the importance.
For me the standout of this second deposition is the extent Prince will go to to maintain an artistic process of freedom and experimentation, almost five decades into his practice. True, it may be the kind of freedom only available to someone making $45 million/year—the tens of thousands of billable dollars per hour represented by a conference room full of the most expensive lawyers in America doesn’t begin to account for the cost incurred to realize this one video work.
But if you’re an artist with the means to re-create the circumstances of your most surprising, innovative moments of creation, wouldn’t you do it? Shouldn’t you?
I saw “2 results for ‘the second deposition of richard prince'”? and then this loaded.
In commemoration of the Roman exhibition of Richard Prince’s Deposition (2025), I present this appropriation, a publication of the unauthorized transcription and accompanying illustration, on a platform of capitalist consolidation.
This softcover version of The Second Deposition of Richard Prince is formatted for easy reading, and includes black and white images of court exhibits being discussed. It also includes a handcrafted index, optimized for art historical and critical discourse.
I’ll have stamped and signed copies available directly, shipping when I get back into my newly militarized town. Or you can buy one or a thousand right now.
Meanwhile, The Deposition of Richard II is a collection of eight late 14th- and early 15th-century Latin texts that chronicle and comment on events that led, in 1399, to the deposition of King Richard II of England and the accession of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. David R. Carlson published it with the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in 2007. At present, according to Abebooks, three copies are available in the UK.
“The Latin style matches the occasion: an unfamiliar, idiosyncratic word-set, repetition and extraordinary verbosity, sentences and clauses so long and involved that even the persons responsible for them sometimes lose grammatical way” Not just lawyers’ Latin, in other words, but a form of lawyers’ Latin appropriate to the gravity of the occasion. And there was clearly a point to all this, just as there was to the precision of the language, because, as Carlson goes on, “precise sense might matter; also, verbosity can make a statement more exact; and repetition, besides hedging against the inevitable flaw of manuscript transmission…elevates meaning.”
The context-driven, linguistic specificity is also the key to Prince’s Deposition, where the language and discursive structure belong to lawyers, not artists. That clashes with art and the frameworks used to understand and explain art in unfamiliar ways that are sometimes absurd and sometimes revelatory. There is literally a moment when Prince, in the middle of a long and deep monologue about rephotography, is interrupted by the lawyer saying, “Do you remember the question at this point, sir?”
With Deposition, Prince appropriated the entire legal process for his expressive purposes: he used this formal, ritualized interrogation to talk about his art—and then he turned it into art.
Now I want to translate Prince’s deposition into Latin.
The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, course pack edition, 2025, 11 x 8.5 in.
A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.
The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, softcover edition, 2025, 9 x 6 in., 120pp
…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.
Here I am fiddling around with printers to make a paperback version, and he just ‘grams it out.
Of course, it IS his deposition.
For a couple of months now, Richard Prince has been showing Deposition (2025), the single channel video version of his second court-ordered deposition in a copyright infringement lawsuit, at Gavin Brown’s Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome. The show runs through this Friday, July 25, to andiamo!
Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 2016, C-print in two parts, Richard Prince Studio via Sant’Andrea de Scaphis
