Skip to content

| Amazing Acts | Spiritual America

| Amazing Acts | is a new regular series of Spectrum Blog posts that focus on religion and the arts. VBS (not that kind) TV interviews American artist Richard Prince in a candid afternoon at his upstate New York compound. Richard recently had a retrospective at the Guggenheim in NYC called “Spiritual America.”

From the Guggenheim catalogue:

Prince’s work has been among the most innovative art produced in the United States during the past 30 years. His deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object. Prince’s technique involves appropriation; he pilfers freely from the vast image bank of popular culture to create works that simultaneously embrace and critique a quintessentially American sensibility: the Marlboro Man, muscle cars, biker chicks, off-color jokes, gag cartoons, and pulp fiction. While previous examinations of his art have emphasized its central role as a catalyst for postmodernist criticism, the Guggenheim exhibition and its accompanying catalogue also focus on the work’s iconography and how it registers prevalent themes in our social [Middle Class] landscape, including a fascination with rebellion, an obsession with fame, and a preoccupation with the tawdry and the illicit.

See more of the Art Talk interview.

Richard Prince

Subscribe to our newsletter
Spectrum Newsletter: The latest Adventist news at your fingertips.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.