Richard Prince

Richard Prince is an American artist whose work rephotographs and reuses images from advertising, popular culture, and other artists. His practice has made authorship, appropriation, and copyright central to debates about contemporary art.

Appropriation art: Art that deliberately borrows or reuses existing images, objects, or styles. Prince is a leading practitioner of art that recasts already circulating images.
Cowboys (Richard Prince series): Richard Prince’s series of rephotographed Marlboro advertisements featuring idealized American cowboys. The series established his signature strategy of cropping and rephotographing commercial imagery.
Cariou v. Prince: A United States appellate case deciding whether Richard Prince’s use of Patrick Cariou’s photographs was fair use. The ruling examined whether Prince’s alterations transformed the borrowed photographs enough to qualify as fair use.
Marlboro Man: The cowboy figure used in Marlboro cigarette advertising from the 1950s onward. Prince’s cowboy works expose how advertising imagery can become an artistic and cultural icon.
Rephotography: The act of photographing an existing photograph or image rather than its original subject. Prince’s early method made magazine photographs into new photographic works.
Nurse Paintings: Richard Prince’s paintings based on covers of mid-century paperback nurse novels. These works convert pulp-fiction covers into paintings while preserving their melodramatic imagery.
Fair use: A United States copyright doctrine permitting certain unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. Fair use is the legal defense most closely associated with disputes over Prince’s borrowed images.
Image appropriation: The reuse of existing visual material in new artworks or cultural contexts. His career helped make image appropriation a central subject in contemporary art discourse.
Readymade: An ordinary manufactured object designated or altered as art. Prince’s reuse of found images extends the readymade’s challenge to artistic originality.
Jokes (Richard Prince series): A body of Richard Prince’s works reproducing jokes and cartoons from magazines and books. The series shifts appropriation from photographs to borrowed jokes and their cultural circulation.

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