Artist Richard Prince (b. 1949) is at once an observer, purveyor, and critic of an American spirituality shaped through promiscuous borrowings from the everyday world. Prince is best known for his technique of “rephotography,” a formal descendant of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in which the artist takes pictures of pre-existing photographs. In these and other works, Prince mimics and critiques the spirituality of his context, employing a range of appropriation strategies in order to recycle, reshape, re-contextualize, and re-purpose the flotsam and fragments of American life: advertisements, car parts, cartoons, dime-store novels, and even other people’s jokes. As critic Nancy Spector has remarked, Prince’s art is thus “stolen but original, ironic but sincere, illusory but real,” something that might be said of the “spiritual America” he invokes.

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