Richard Prince, a New York-based artist whose work often involves appropriating that of others, has been sued for copyright infringement by Donald Graham, a photographer who claims Prince knowingly reproduced his photo Rastafarian Smoking a Joint without seeking permission.
Artnet reports that Graham filed a complaint on 30 December against Prince, the Gagosian Gallery – where Prince’s New Portraits exhibition ran between September and October 2014 – and Lawrence Gagosian, the gallery owner.
The New Portraits collection featured 37 inkjet prints on canvas of what Prince called “screen saves” of Instagram posts, according to the complaint. The only modification to the images by Prince, besides blowing them up in size, are in comments underneath the pictures comprised of emojis and bizarre sentences. The pieces sold for up to $100,000 at New York’s Frieze art fair, where they caused considerable controversy.
One woman in the photographs, Doe Deere, a member of the SuicideGirls burlesque collective, posted on Instagram that she had been told the picture of her had been sold for $90,000. Prince, as is his custom, had not asked permission to use the images.
Graham said in his complaint that Prince’s reproduction of Graham’s photograph – a black and white image of a Rastafarian man lighting a joint – was not modified adequately to warrant being called an original work. The piece was sold to Gagosian after the New Portraits exhibition closed.
This is not Prince’s first legal skirmish with an artist whose work he repurposed. In 2014, Prince settled a three-year-long copyright case with the photographer Patrick Cariou after he used Cariou’s Yes, Rasta, a book on the rastafarian community, as a part of his Canal Zone series.
Prince is known for appropriating established works by other artists. Regarding the legal implications of his work, Prince said in 2011, according to the complaint: “Copyright has never interested me. For most of my life I owned half a stereo, so there was no point in suing me, but that’s changed now and it’s interesting … So, sometimes it’s better not to be successful and well-known and you can get away with much more. I knew what I was stealing 30 years ago but it didn’t matter because no one cared, no one was paying any attention.”
Graham’s complaint follows reports from February 2015 that Graham sent a cease-and-desist letter to Prince and the Gagosian Gallery demanding the gallery remove and stop displaying reproductions of his work.
In October 2014, Graham posted a photo of the exhibit to his Instagram page, including the print of his Rastafarian Smoking Joint, with the caption: “Appropriated Exhibit. The only way you’d know my work was a part of this display is...well, that’s just it, you wouldn’t know. #PrinceofAppropriation”.
On another post of just the black and white image, Graham wrote in the caption: “How to credit a work: ‘Rastafarian Smoking a Joint’ © 1997 Donald Graham. #PrinceofAppropriation”.
