bitch i’ve always been an artist
Imagine receiving a text message that one of the world’s most prominent artists had appropriated your work, divorcing it of its original meaning. That’s exactly what happened to Audrey Wollen, a Los Angeles-based artist whose recreation of Diego Velázquez’s ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as a self-portrait was recently used by Richard Prince as part of his New Portraits series. […]
I was really angry, but not at all surprised. An old, white, successful, straight male artist feeling entitled to the image of a young female body is not surprising. My photograph wasn’t included in his show at Gagosian, but by distributing it through the internet under his name without any consent, he completely erased my authorship and identity. I really was just a photograph of a naked girl, up for grabs. Maybe I’m idealistic, but I don’t think art should simply reiterate the status quo. […] I think a lot of people mistake Prince’s work as purely an issue of appropriation - like, if you condemn Prince, you condemn appropriation on principle. That’s not the point: Appropriation is chill, as long as the person doing the appropriating is not the person in power. What Prince is doing is colonising and profiting off a territory of the internet that was created by a community of young girls, who, needless to say, do not have the cultural space Prince has. Selecting specific bodies from a sea of images, amputating them from their context, and then naming yourself the owner of those bodies: that isn’t just boring art, that verges on predatory and violent behavior.
