You were warned! Your private moments, drinking binges and social dos that feature on your Instagram account are goldmine for people like Richard Prince.
Prince's New Portraits series sparked furious debate this week when some of the images were shown at Frieze Art Fair in New York, simply because of his creative process – he'd not really made anything, just stolen people's Instagrams.
The ‘works’ are mainly from one feed called Suicide Girls, an account with 3.3 million followers that posts pictures of tattooed women in seductive poses.
The images are screenshots taken with his smartphone and feature a short message by Prince himself as the last comment on each one. Dubbed by art critics as 'genius trolling', some of the images are marked up to $100,000 (Rs 63.8 lakh). Not a single cent will go to the photographers, since his work falls under fair use.
Prince sold one of his works for $90,000 (Rs 57.4 lakh); in retaliation, Suicide Girls founder Missy Suicide offered to sell her own prints for $90, with any proceeds going to charity, DazedDigital reported.
For what it's worth, Missy Suicide doesn't really bother about what Prince is doing.
Writing on the Suicide Girls website, she said: "Richard Prince is an artist and he found the images we and our girls publish on Instagram as representative of something worth commenting on, part of the zeitgeist, I guess? Thanks Richard! I am just bummed that his art is out of reach for people like me and the people portrayed in the art he is selling."
Among others, Prince used a photo of Doe Deere, the CEO of Lime Crime. Last week, she had Instagrammed a picture from the Frieze exhibition.
On her image being sold as ‘art’, she wrote: ‘Figured I might as well post this since everyone is texting me. Yes, my portrait is currently displayed at the Frieze Gallery in NYC. Yes, it's just a screenshot (not a painting) of my original post. No, I did not give my permission and yes, the controversial artist Richard Prince put it up anyway. It's already sold ($90K I've been told) during the VIP preview. No, I'm not gonna go after him. And nope, I have no idea who ended up with it!’
You would think the original Instagrammers could sue Prince for copyright infringement. But, according to Huffington Post, because Prince edited the photos to include his own comments, the works count as original pieces of art.
But then, are they really?
