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4 comments from readers

Spiritual Curator
04 October 2009 at 22:11

Sorry, Prince's work is illegal (if you can really call it his "work"). Prince is a minor artist at best, living off of the talent of other photographers and artists (perhaps most notably Jim Krantz and Sam Abell, but you can added Henry Youngerman to that list, along with others...). "Photographic unconscious"?? Don't you think Phillip Morris knew exactly what they were doing by peddling the Marlborough Man? Are you so daft that you need Prince to point out the complex visual fictions inherent in the images? That doesn't change the image...it doesn't change the fictions inherent within the work either. Prince doesn't augment the images at all because he's selling the image, not his "commentary".

In fact, I'd argue that all of Prince's "work" is meaningless...mere tautology. Read your Roland Barthes...the function of popular art that appears to subvert and undermine middle-class values and institutions is actually to reinforce them.

Don't you think it's a bit bizarre that Prince has ended up hand-in-hand with Marc Jacobs? Do you really think supermodels strutting along the catwalk dressed in nurse uniforms is an image that DEFLATES nurse-based fetishes. Or shooting Kate Moss in a nurse uniform distances the viewer from fetishizing nurses? Likewise, the cowboys are purchased BECAUSE they are iconic, not ironic. And again, those visual fictions (that Prince pretends to be "investigating" by copying) remain intact despite his appropriation of the images. When a collector walks out of the gallery with a Cowboy photo and goes and hangs the piece in their house, how has the image really changed from being a Jim Krantz or a Sam Abell image?

Similarly, the Brooke Shields photograph's sole value is in the shock of seeing the original Gross image. Prince re-framed it...he didn't add anything to the image when he originally displayed it...sorry....he supplied no commentary (are you really going to argue that adding a frame and placing the image in a dark live-nude-girls context changes the intent of the image?).

Copying is not authorship. The point of the Tate exhibit is artists who use famous figures to promote themselves...in that light, the inclusion was correct. However, the image is obscene and illegal, a photograph of a naked ten-year-old girl wearing make-up, specifically constructed for a soft-porn press.

If the curators were so intent on maintaining their pornographic aesthetic, they would have been better served sticking a Thomas Ruff photo in (at least he slightly, slightly augments the photos)...it still would have been, and is ridiculous, but adults can give consent...children can't.

FAIL!

Yo Zushi
05 October 2009 at 10:43

Hello there. I know Barthes was concerned that transgressive art could actually end up normalising its subject ("inoculation" and all that), but it doesn't change the fact that one of the principal roles of art in general is to provide a platform for debate. Would you rather that artists dealt exclusively with what was comfortable and socially acceptable? Meanwhile, you say that Prince "didn't add anything to the image when he originally displayed it", and that "he supplied no commentary". By removing the image from the pages of a sub-Playboy mag and placing it in a down-town shopfront, he was loading it with a new context. You don't have to be a Duchamp or Derrida expert to have some appreciation of the importance of context in art. This act of appropriation would have been "commentary" enough, but he also put it in a gilt frame, and later named it "Spiritual America". And considering you're a Barthes fan, I'm surprised you can come up with stuff like: "Copying is not authorship". Didn't he tell you? The author is dead.

Gregory Carlin
06 October 2009 at 09:48

Child pornography ( in Britain) is legislatively defined as a product of indecency.

Strictly speaking, there has been an admission of sexualized content, and this aticle conforms to the same, it is therefore child pornography in Britain.

Ms Elliot, if anything understated the problem. What we have, are people who want to be above the law.

Monkey Magic
19 October 2009 at 13:15

I agree with your argument against the depressing conservatism and paranoia of the art establishment, but I think you over-simplify Prince's work when you write of the image that "Its function is not to titillate". By saying so, you deproblematise the experience of viewing Spiritual America and artworks based on pornography in general.

I believe that no amount of reframing or recontextualisation can annul the original sexual force of the image. It still titillates, or tries to do so, in spite of its new context within the gallery - this is what makes looking at and thinking about it so interesting. The disturbing pornographic element ('disturbing' because the image is of a child) puts into play the multiple double-takes, intellectual readjustments and self-censorship that the viewer must negotiate as he looks at the image, and all the moral, social and historical questions that this viewing process poses. I do not think that we look at the image and simply see through it to the commentary or critique.

My point is that much of the critical force of Spiritual America depends on its capacity to titillate. This is the reason why I think it is disingenuous to counter conservative arguments against its showing by saying that the function of the image "is not to titillate.

This is the way Spiritual America seems to work for me. What do you think?