Richard Prince recently
made huge profits from sale of strangers’ Instagram photos. This has been
drawing a lot of negative reaction.
The painter and
photographer blew up screenshots of other people's Instagrams, hung them at the
Frieze Art Fair in New York and reportedly
sold almost all of them for $90,000 each.
Prince called his
exhibit "New Portraits," and the fact that he sold photos without the
permission or even the knowledge of many of the original photographers is not
sitting well with some people.
"New
Portraits" originally went up last year at the Gagosian Gallery, but it
was the sale of the pieces this month that has had a negative development for
the man who has been "rephotographing" for years, taking pictures of
other photographs and altering them.
The issue has prompted a
conversation about copyright and fair use, a debate that Prince has found
himself in the center of before.
The Washington Post
reports that in 2008, "French photographer Patrick Cariou sued
Prince after he re-photographed Cariou's images of Jamaica's Rastafarian
community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince
had not committed copyright infringement because his works were
'transformative.' "
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