Richard Prince has caused quite a commotion over the past week after it came to light that he has been selling other people’s Instagram photos for upwards of $100,000. Now, one of the people he took from is responding in a clever way: she’s reselling Prince’s artwork for $90 instead of $90,000.
The woman is Missy Suicide, the co-founder of the pin-up photo brand SuicideGirls. One of the photos featured in Prince’s recent gallery show was an image that had been posted by the @suicidegirls Instagram account.
“Everyone has been asking me what I thought about famous controversial artist Richard Prince taking a series of SuicideGirls Instagram posts and printing them out and selling them at a recent gallery show at the Gagosian Gallery of Beverly Hills for $90,000 a piece,” Suicide writes. “My first thought was I don’t know anyone who can spend $90,000 on anything other than a house.”
“As to the copyright issue? If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavor I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art.”
In response to Prince’s actions, Suicide just announced that she’s selling the same print as Prince (based on her photo), in the same size (67×55 inches), with the same materials (inkjet on canvas) — but instead of the $90,000 he’s charging wealthy art collectors, Suicide is only charging $90 each.
“Do we have Mr. Prince’s permission to sell these prints? We have the same permission from him that he had from us. […] I hope you love them. Beautiful Art, 99.9% off the original price,” Suicide writes.
Prince responded to Suicide today with a simple tweet:
Much better idea. I started off selling my “family” tweets for $18 at Karma not to long ago. Missy Suicide is smart. pic.twitter.com/3OfjgNBq4a
— Richard Prince (@RichardPrince4) May 28, 2015
The print is available through the SuicideGirls online store, and Suicide says that all profits from the sales will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.