Richard Prince: Hustler extraordinaire

So, the New York Times ran this article last week about an artist called Richard Prince, here artist meaning "dude who gets his shit hung in galleries", not "dude who gets his shit put on sendspace two weeks before he starts selling it in stores." Prince, however, has done some work for that latter type of artist; one of his paintings graces the cover of Sonic Youth's Nurse album. Serendipitously, that's the same Sonic Youth that once recorded the track "Kool Thing" with Chuck D of Public Enemy; serendipitous because that same Chuck D, on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, rapped "Caught, now in court 'cause I stole a beat/This is a sampling sport/But I'm giving it a new name." Richard Prince, the shit-hung-in-galleries artist, doesn't steal beats. He steals photographs. Apparently there's a big difference.

Perhaps I should explain?

Richard Prince is an artist who, among other things, likes to take photographs of photographs other people have taken. Then he sells them for a million bucks ($1.2 million, if we want to be precise about one particular case). That's pretty much the definition of hustling right there. You can see him in action with the images at the top of this post. The top photo is called Calf Rescue and was taken by Jim Krantz as a Marlboro advertisement. The photo beneath that is Untitled (Cowboy), by Richard Prince, who photographed it out of a magazine that ran the advertisement, blew it up to gigantic size and then got the Guggenheim to exhibit it. Also, he sold it for about $300 000.

Since the late '70s, Prince has been doing this type of artwork, in which he finds images and uses them to create his own pieces. In much the same way, since the early-mid '70s, hip hop artists have been finding sounds and using them to create their own pieces. When hip hop producers do it, though, they have to involve legions of lawyers to get the sample "cleared," that is, they have to sweet-talk (and frequently grease the palm of) the person who created the original track, no matter how infinitesimally small their involvement was. When Richard Prince does it he has to... well, he doesn't actually have to do anything. He just takes his photo and sticks his hand out for his scrilla.

Jim Krantz, the guy who took the top photo up there, recently went to the Guggenheim exhibit of Prince's work and was apparently pretty surprised to see what looked like one of his photographs on a poster outside the museum advertising the exhibit. "Like anyone who knows his work,” he told the New York Times, "it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror." The Times goes on to say, "He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, 'When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.'"

After that Krantz did like those bitches Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, called up his lawyer and raped Prince for all the money he earnt from that photograph, just like the Rolling Stones did to the Verve when the Verve sampled an orchestral cover of a Stones hit. Actually, that's not true. "Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince," says the Times. According to the Times, Prince's "borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law."

Someone should tell people like Just Blaze that, because copyright law is fucking up his means of making art (and money). Just Blaze wrote on his blog a while back:

The process of clearing samples costs money. You’re not just calling up James Brown’s estate and saying, "Hey, we want to sample one of your songs, how much?" There are lawyers, publishers, managers and sample clearance houses involved. Sample clearance houses are companies that you submit your song to, along with the song you sampled, and they will do research (if necesarry), track down everyone and anyone that would have any say-so in the record (not always easy) and coordinate terms between all the parties involved. And… they don’t do it for free, even if you get denied. Anyway, back to the previous point, being that this costs money AND time, you are not going to start clearing a sample as soon as you make a beat, and you aren’t going to clear it once you start recording, you are going to clear it once you have an idea that the record is something you definitely want to use.

Richard Prince doesn't have to do that. Perhaps that's because he's the shit-hanging-in-galleries type of artist. Lucky guy, huh?

I'm not going to get on some rant about Prince not being a real artist and how he should be paying out the nose to all the "genuine" photographers whose work he "stole" as some critics of post-modernism would. For a start, if someone can sell a photo he took of your photo for a million bucks, and it never occured to you to get in first, you're kind of asking for it. Also, I think there is an artistic quality to Prince's work; the images I posted above, although formally identical, differ in that Prince's reproduction has a distant, dreamlike quality that isn't in the original, but is found in many of the other samples the Guggenheim Web site is displaying to promote its exhibit. And that's entirely before taking into consideration the artistic effect of displaying anything in an art gallery. Art, when put in a fancy building amidst a bunch of other art, takes on a different quality, and that's true whether you think it deserves to benefit from that context or not. Whatever the specifics of what Prince is doing, he's definitely doing something.

But so is Kanye West when he takes a tiny snippet of Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T." for his current hit "The Good Life." In fact, West's contribution to the "Good Life" signficantly dwarfs Prince's contribution to Krantz's image. But where Krantz only wants recognition for his work (The Times articles says, "he simply wanted viewers to know that 'there are actually people behind these images'") Quincy Jones gets a songwriting credit on the 'Ye track (as he did on "P.Y.T."), which also means he gets a check in his mailbox every time someone buys Graduation or radio plays the track.

Anthony Falzone argued in Slate last month that big name hip hop artists could have done a whole lot more to establish a fair use basis for sampling in their songs (read that article in full; it's worth it). Which is possibly true. It's quite possible that many already successful artists don't have the appetite for a long and expensive legal fight for the benefit of producers who don't have multi-national record company resources at their disposal. Similarly, the record companies, who often have a stake in the ownership of a rapper's songs, may feel it is easier to pay the fee to the owner of a sampled record than to risk fighting a protracted legal battle. Particularly when the owner of that song could be the record company in question anyway. Why let the artist have more money when you could claim your share as a "sample clearance"?

So why do rappers and producers have to endure this, but Richard Prince doesn't? Surely if old musicians and record companies are protective of their copyrights, genuine assholes like the owners of tobacco companies are too, to an even greater extent? Why does does the Biggie estate have to pay off a multitude of different people who had precious little to do with the creation of Ready to Die just to keep that album on the shelf? I don't know. But the Guggenheim's blurb about one particular period of Prince's career is revealing:

Drawing his material from the pages of trashy tabloids and special-interest magazines, Prince created alternative pantheons of monster-truck enthusiasts, glam rockers, porn stars, and paparazzi victims

When Prince is plundering the cultural landscape of the type of people who read "trashy tabloids and special-interest magazines" for the benefit of gallery-goers, he's handed big checks. When the people who create art that is enjoyed by people who read "trashy tabloids and special-interest magazines," they have to pay lawyers or they get handed big lawsuits. I'm not saying it's intentional (nor am I saying that lawyers don't read trashy magazines, that lawyers never enjoy hip-hop or that readers of trashy magazines can't become lawyers). But unless it's actively fought against, people who are in power will remain the primary beneficiaries of their power. Chuck D once rapped, "I found this mineral that I call a beat/I paid zero." Wouldn't it be great if that applied to people who make the songs we hear on the radio as well as the people who make the pictures we see in our art galleries?