richard prince

UNTITLED (PUBLICITY)

This series, Untitled (Publicity), by the American artist Richard Prince, is composed of images of actors and musicians originally produced as promotional material for distributors, the press, and media outlets. Richard Prince reappropriates these images and screen-prints them in grouped compositions on canvas, adding handwritten questions modeled on game-show quizzes.

These works show how glamour and celebrity imagery have been transformed into industrialized mass-media products, circulating from films and album covers to advertising, press articles, posters, and television. As they spread through society, such images become volatile fragments of desire, projection, and collective fantasy.

By appropriating celebrity images already in the public domain, Richard Prince recontextualizes them as art, revealing how their Warholian repetition produces an industrialized mythology of icons. His artworks function as a comment on the devaluation and commercialization of the aura of the original image, within the maelstrom of what French philosopher Guy Debord…