About the Work
The joke is in the cliché! Andy Warhol's disciple Richard Prince provides the consumer art market with pointed imagery. The trivial subject, elevated to the position of artificial eye-catcher, provides the willing customer-collectors with the delights of ordinariness. Postcard photos of celebrated idols, adorned with the monotonous dedication "To Richard Prince" and the routine wish "All the Best", gratify the artist, who represents the fans. The expression of sympathetic proximity is deceptive, however. With her aura, the diva gazing upwards on a black-and-white print seems more familiar to the viewer than her later rival in colour, because the stars of the entertainment business behave in a uniformly sterile manner on pop posters. They sign their portraits with empty phrases, Courtney Love and Cameron Diaz just as much as Mike Tyson and Keanu Reeves. Prince merely ennobles the stereotype with his signature - and that has its price. A cowboy, summoned from the Marlboro advertisements, but changed in format and colour, is photographed several times with evident irony. In Prince's work, even jokes that are written on a canvas maintain their status as art.
