The tattooed, alt-pinup Suicide Girls are appropriating their appropriator.
It’s a response to reports that Richard Prince, the artist who controversially created a successful show out of other people’s Instagram photos, sold one of his latest—a blown up print, originally posted by and depicting model Doe Deer—for $90,000. So Suicide Girls founder Missy Suicide has put her own prints of Prince’s print of Deer’s prints on sale for $90.
Proceeds, Suicide said, will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions, among other Internet freedoms, the importance of fair use in online copyright.
Critics are split on the value of Richard Prince’s latest endeavor. Responses range from calling it “genius trolling” to “like watching your dad try to rap.” To his credit, that unease of ownership is sort of the point: Prince has long dabbled in using uneasy appropriation of existing works, ranging back to the early 1980s, when he created Untitled (Cowboys) by simply taking pictures of Marlboro ads.
“My first thought was I don’t know anyone who can spend $90,000 on anything other than a house,” Suicide wrote on a Reddit post, adding she had no plans to see if she could get at some of Prince’s profits through a lawsuit. “As to the copyright issue? If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavor, I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art.”
Prince, for his part, called Suicide’s prints a “Much better idea.”
Much better idea. I started off selling my "family" tweets for $18 at Karma not to long ago. Missy Suicide is smart. pic.twitter.com/3OfjgNBq4a
— Richard Prince (@RichardPrince4) May 28, 2015
H/T The Guardian. Photos via Reddit