Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Richard Prince at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis


(link)

Is this a Kaufman reality bending skit? Or is Richard Prince really so self-grandiose to bloviate this hard under questioning? Or, after the lightbulb moment of greg.org publishing his first deposition, did Prince see the metaphorical soapbox awaiting his spotlight to bloviate. It would be appropriate. And Kaufmanesque. Weirdly the more "authentic" Prince gets, the more Fischer Price the whole deposition feels. Prince's and the artworld's high-speech feels chintzy against the procedural of legal questioning. No one reacts at all to Prince's deludes, except to worry about Prince's own time here. One of the zaniest things about the testimony is how inflated Prince's opinion is of his work. And how he keeps trying to reframe questions into grand timescales of art history and rapid firing dead European painters. It all feels Kaufmanesque. But repeating the joke is what Prince is good at. 


See too: "Art, in all its critical hooha, attempts to both access the real as politics while at the same time asserting its critical distance as a sovereign land of pure ideation or whatever. The friction (and paradox) of these two positions is never more apparent than when the artworld sends one it’s s creative sovereign citizens into the courtroom where inevitably our kingdom's Prince loses his legal battle and the artworld collectively wrings its hands and decries a legal system not quite understanding the rub. We, artworld, are bodies collectively absolved of debt. Or so it were."