Getty and Corbis of course have an interest in strict copyright law because they collectively own nearly 200 million images and make an estimated $1 Billion USD each year licensing them. They believe that if an artist is going to make a transformative work, it should be licensed first.
The brief is covered by GalleristNY, and ArtInfo.

TechDirt has a piece called: When Judges Are Determining Whether Or Not Art Should Exist… We Have A Problem Commenting on the fact that the art may need to be destroyed:

“Personally, it’s not my taste, but I’ll be damned if my own personal taste (or any other third party’s personal taste) should ever be the determining factor in whether or not any particular piece of art should exist.”

Vice Magazine has an extensive article that concludes:

“At this point you must be asking yourself, “Hey, wait a minute. Who’s on trial here?” The answer to that is simple enough. You, me, and everyone we know. Richard Prince, Patrick Cariou, the judge and the law. Especially the law if it’s ill-equipped for these times, or if it’s applied in a narrow-minded way. Why Richard Prince didn’t defend himself more vigorously in court is a mystery to many of us. Because the case wasn’t only against him and his funny pictures, by which some people cannot be much amused. It was against us all. This kind of art has its history, and its future will not be denied. It will have its day in court. And the culture will evolve even if the art appears to have devolved. You may not like this approach to picture-making, or the way old songs are cut up, reassembled and performed, but you cannot say that the original has not been transformed. There is also a double bind to consider: most educated people don’t want to appear ignorant about art, and yet they don’t want to be seen having the proverbial wool pulled over their eyes. The fact that today’s art is probably misunderstood and disliked in most courts of law is actually a hopeful sign. It means that we are moving forward, slowly but surely. In art and music as in nature, every river has its source, and there are many rivers to cross.”

ArtInfo looks far beyond just the effect this case may have on photographers and considers the effect that it may have on google (who by the way filed a neutral brief on the case)

“The opinion as it stands imposes a very narrow definition of fair use, which requires that a new work that uses content from a copyrighted work be “transformative.” Specifically, it has to transform the old work by commenting on or criticizing the original work. If this were the law, Google would have a big problem. The company uses a lot of copyrighted work (notably, a huge chunk of the Internet) without transforming it at all. In order to show webpages that appear on its search page, it basically trolls the Web, copying all the pages it finds in order to index the web’s content. When it does that, it copies without comment or criticism — if it did, the search function wouldn’t be helpful. “

Read the statement from the Warhol Foundation Below

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has filed a brief in New York urging a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court’s ruling that thirty paintings by the artist Richard Prince infringe copyrights in photographs owned by Patrick Cariou. The lower court’s ruling led to the seizure of Prince’s work and subjects it to potential destruction. The Foundation is being represented by attorneys from Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project, New York City attorney Virginia Rutledge, and Bingham McCutchen LLP.

Prince’s paintings are part of his Canal Zone series, and include images of Rastafarians found in Cariou’s book Yes, Rasta.

In a ruling issued last March, U.S. District Judge Deborah A. Batts held Prince liable for infringement, concluding that his appropriation of images from Cariou’s photographs was not protected by the “fair use doctrine,” a legal principle that is designed to balance copyright protections with rights of artistic expression. Michael Straus, the Warhol Foundation’s Chair, said “the position of the Foundation is that the District Court gravely misconstrued that doctrine and in so doing not only jeopardized the status of existing works by a range of artists but also created such uncertainty in the field as to cause a chilling effect on the creation of new works.” Among other things, as the Warhol Foundation explains in its brief, the appropriation of images to create new works is part of an important artistic tradition that goes back to Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and notably includes Andy Warhol’s own use of photographic and other images in his works.

“The Warhol Foundation’s primary mission is to advance the visual arts,” explained Joel Wachs, the Warhol Foundation’s President. “The Foundation encourages creativity over a wide range of artistic expression and therefore does not object to other artists building upon Andy Warhol’s work. At the same time the Foundation owns valuable copyrights in those works that provide substantial revenue for the Foundation’s grant making and other activities. In its own decisions the Foundation balances the need to provide strong copyright protection with the need to protect the right to create new art. We think the District Court failed to understand that balance and therefore urge the Court of Appeals both to reverse that decision and to set forth guidelines that will promote rather than undermine creativity in the arts.”

“The fair use doctrine is the most important tool courts have to ensure that copyright does not choke the creativity it is supposed to foster,” said Anthony T. Falzone, Executive Director of the Fair Use Project and counsel for the Foundation. “Artists should not have to hire a lawyer to make art, and we’re suggesting an approach that provides clearer protection for the free expression interests of artists and the public.”

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.

Read the full story here: http://freq.uenci.es/2011/10/21/richard-prince-spiritual-america-1983/

I was lucky to be invited to see Bob Dylan’s paintings when I was in L.A. this past winter. Part of the seeing was how I got there. I’m not going to tell you exactly where it was, but getting to his studio was like that scene in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta parks his car outside a nightclub … I think it’s Copacabana … and goes in a side entrance, down a hall past a lazy-ass watchman, into the kitchen, through another hallway, and out into the main room and ends up right next to the maître d’, who then ignores the people in line waiting to get in and hugs and kisses Ray and his girlfriend and shows them right down in front of the stage, where a small table, two chairs, and a plug-in lamp suddenly, miraculously, appear.  Read the full review here

 

Why I go to the Movies Alone
Pg. 3-6

The Perfect Tense
A lot of people wish they were someone else. And some of us would like
to exchange parts with other people, keeping what we already like and
jettisoning the things we can’t stand. Some people would like to try to change places, just for a day, with maybe someone they admired or even envied, to see what it would be like, to see if it would be what they’d always heard it would be.

There are those too, that are quite satisfied with themselves and never think
about such things as another person’s blessings, and it seemed appropriate to
someone like him, that these satisfied ones were the ones that he most wanted to be like and exchange with and try to take the place of.
He could never imagine what it must be like to spend an entire day
without ever having to avoid a mirror. And where he lived, he made sure, never had a reflection, and any surface that did so, got dulled or rubbed out, and any
surface that became stubborn and kept its polish, got thrown in a bucket.
When he went out, to the outside, he would make sure to take care of all
of what was him, and be aware to resist and turn away from even a frame of
glass, something as common as a darkened window. Uninhibited unconsciousness was something uninheritable, like a nameless form of new life, something not learned – a kind of anomalous gracenote.

This type of character or “component”, (as he came to call it) was one of
his wishes – a surprise he had asked for on every one of his thirty-three
birthdays and though the chances of receiving this prize was next to under the well, it became a habit, an attitude, a toll to be paid, like sure, make the bet,
why not, wishful thinking cost about as much as the chances of getting it anyway.

His physical demands and his inability to come to terms with their order,
wasn’t, as one would assume, eccentric, or even dangerously whimsical. He
had justifiable reasons, and asking for deliverance, however unanswered, was, he felt, strict and necessary clockwork. Mostly he wasn’t sure, (a question of sorts) of how long he could continue to walk around with the feeling of blood on his hands.

He used to live in the West Village in New York on Eleventh Street near
the southwest corner of Hudson Street. And even in a part of the city where a lot of men were incredibly handsome, he was more. His look had the call, they
exploded the bill for what was generally considered classical or God-like, and
what was usually said about them was something like, “how can that be”.
He had heard this many times and as many times as he had, he still took
it badly, sort of seeing his luck as a curse, something thought up on purpose,
a bone pointed at him by an unknown tribe for reasons he felt unfair. He was
being punished for existing as he was, and what was left of his life came to be
lived as a version of one, like a shadow, (a life as subtle as a detail)
always making sure never to be tagged or named, good guy or bad guy.
The self-casting or this is assumed state of invisibility, was the ready
way he figured to avoid embarassment and showdown. Being what many people imagined as the most handsome man in the world was not at all the adventure it was rumored to be.

Privacy in public, at least in the city, was something negotiated. The constant fingering and targeting was never as harmless as gossip or whisper, and what most people tolerated as “dirty laundry”, he rightly feared as a possible, (at any time) lynch mob free-for-all.

He had spent most of his adult life in an urban surrounding, where pedestrian relationships had come to be seen as modern dance. He would say he was a
solo performer, an independent, someone who ramrodded more than walked and if his move wasn’t exactly in a straight line, he’d come about as if in a
sail-race and return from where he began- usually his home, go inside, stay, and not come out for a week.

He wasn’t a martyr. He wasn’t someone who felt sorry for himself and
walked around with his head down willingly. Eye contact was supposed to be
natural and welcomed, and having to wear dark glasses, as one would wear a pair of shoes, wasn’t for him, jazzy or cool or soulful.

The turning of heads, or the useless effect of stopping traffic, was like
confronting his peers as a set of exposures. People froze and anticipated,
as if the sight of his presence was religious in nature. It was scary. Really
a fright. He was better than Christ, he was physically perfect.
He came to refer to his condition as surface, and his surface was a sign
of an emotion that the literal could be as true, perhaps truer than the
symbol. I mean the man could breathe and unless he died and came to be known only through a photograph, then one would have to concede that the tables had turned.

His literalness was what was real. This is what he wore on his hands.
He was a carrier, maybe the only one, an ever present reminder that proportion
and line and beauty did not necessarily exist only in an impression or form or
idea. This was what all the blood was about, and this revelation and the
seriousness of it, weighed an amazing ton.

Pg. 11
The first time he saw her, he saw her in a photograph. He had seen her
before, at her job, but there, she didn’t come across or measure up anywhere
near as well as she did in her picture. Behind her desk she was too real to
look at, and what she did in daily life could never guarantee the effect of what
usually came to be received from an objective resemblance. He had to have her
on paper, a material with a flat and seamless surface; a physical location
which could represent her resemblance all in one place; a place that had the
chances of looking real, but a place that didn’t have any specific chances of being real.

His fantasies, and right now, the one of her, needed satisfaction. And
satisfaction, at least in part, seemed to come about by injesting, perhaps
“perceiving”, the fiction her photograph imagined.

She had to be condensed and inscribed in a way that his expectations of
what he wanted her to be, (and what he wanted to be too) could at least be
possibly, even remotely, realized. Overdetermination was part of his plan and in
a strange way, the same kind of psychological after-life was what he loved,
sometimes double loved about her picture.

It wasn’t that he wanted to worship her. And it wasn’t that he wanted to
be taxed and organized by a kind of uncritical devotion. But her image did
seem to have a concrete and actual form, an incarnate power – a power that he
could willingly and easily contribute to. And what he seemed to be able to do,
either in front or away from it, was pass time in a particular bodily state, an
alternating balance which turned him in and out and made him see something
about a life after death.

Pg. 45
One of his friends said she wanted, what she did, to have a kind of mix, a
cross perhaps, between the Velvet Underground and The Beach Boys.
Her attitude or reasoning was simply based on the fact that she’d paid
out her own money for all their albums and had played them for a number of
years, never seeming to tire of the same songs no matter how many times she had heard them.

She had never qualified the two groups and never tried to figure out why
she received pretty much of the same kind of satisfaction from what could have
been easily described as sounds and images from two different worlds.
Again she just thought the worlds were interesting and there was, she
felt, no reason she couldn’t be a citizen of both.

This of course is not to say she wasn’t aware of the blackness, the
leather, the shininess of the Underground; or the sunshine, surf, and sand,
associated with the Beachboys. But she knew too that these things were descriptions, ways of fabricating a sense (surrounding the attraction), a way to put your finger on them and make whatever they were supposed to be, easier to swallow- a lot of “things” that were hardly thought about in the middle of a crowd, late at night, with eyes shut tight; jerking about in a room in a building, way down at the end of the city, where there was no such thing as the one and only, the honest to goodness, or the genuine article.
Pg.: 49
For the past couple of weeks, one of the first things he begins to think
about after getting out of bed, is getting back in. He gets up, turns on the
radio, looks out the window, (up to the sky) puts some water on his face, and
takes a deep breath into the mirror. This part too gets turned around and even though he never likes what he sees, he still tries to convince himself that what’s in the mirror is just a reflection, something that can be managed by staring back, staring and releasing what he knows to be true.
“It’s better than fighting the impossible”, he says, “and what I know, I
just admit to”.
This “arrangement” even though it’s slowly, steadily putting him into a
deep, hollow-like sleep, the sleep he knows won’t be legendary.
“One of these days I’m going to wake up a dumb blonde. Believe me, I’m
working on it. I’m thinking things like what if I take the phone off the hook,
how long would it be before someone broke down my door to see if this is
where I was.”
He has begun to think that this idea about keeping to his bed is
suggesting something finally meaningful. It isn’t just an idea anymore. It has come to represent a way back into a parochial structure, almost taking something like an untitled holiday. And it’s funny too, because he knows this structure has always been belittled by people who he had hoped to charge pedestrian affairs with a kind of cosmopolitan insurgence.
“Emigrants with a mission”, he calls them. “Maybe it’s a bit easier for
me. I was born in the Canal Zone – I mean the place isn’t even there anymore.
So it’s not like I’m breaking out of a history or off of a background.
Luckily for me, the darkened room, the small black and white tv, the phone, the down comforter – it’s all quite an acceptable substitute for vision and drama.”
“I never wanted to leave my room in the first place and I see no reason
why this particular desire to be grounded, be looked upon as an unfortunate
style. I like to stay home. I’ve never felt an urgency to assimilate. And
anyway, isn’t this the kind of arrangement most people want after they’ve taken over a little piece of the world?”
The Velvet Well
Pg.: 63
Magazines, movies, t.v., and records. It wasn’t everybody’s condition
but to him it sometimes seemed like it was, and if it really wasn’t, that was
alright, but it was going to be hard for him to connect with someone who passed themselves off as an example or a version of a life put together from
reasonable matter.

He had already accepted all these conditions and built out of their
givens, and to him what was given was anything public and what was public was always real. He transported these givens to a reality more real than the condition he first accepted. He was never too clever, too assertive, too
intellectual – especially too decorative. He had a spirit that made it easier to receive than to censor.

His own desires had very little to do with what came from himself because
what he putout, (at least in part) had already been out. His way to make it
new was make it again, and making it again was enough for him and certainly,
personally speaking, almost him.

I also reread parts of The Imaginary Signifier by Christian Metz. I read
what he had to say about perfume. He said any socially acceptable art that
depends on the senses of contact is a minor art. Not at all like the major
arts, which he says are based on the senses of distance and transparency.

I made a note to go up to Saks Fifth Avenue to pick up the new spring fragrance
catalogue. I had seen it over at a friend’s house. It said on the cover,
“A Celebration of the Senses as Seen Through the Eyes of Horst”.
The title of the catalogue was “Pulse Points”. A great little give-away. Collectible.
I’ve always tried to give some attention to what appears to be ephemera, to
collect the minor art forms.

Later, I finished The Eternal Moment by E. M. Forster. I had managed to
get a pretty fair copy at the Antiquarian Book Fair from a dealer from
California. It was the English edition with only a small tear on the dusk jacket.
The back of the jacket has some minor rubbing, and the endpapers were foxed,
but otherwise it was a good copy of this scarce title. A friend suggested that
maybe later I should read Forster’s short story “When the Machine Stops”. He
said it had to do with desire for firsthand experience.

I went to Forbidden Planet on 12th Street and Broadway, a bookstore that
specializes in comic books, sci-fi and pulp paperbacks. I was hoping to find a
copy of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, a first printing. I was sure
they would have it, but they didn’t. Instead, I found a copy of Pierre
Boulle’s Planet of the Apes; it was a copy I had never seen before, a 1964 Signet
wrapper edition. The cover illustration depicted three astronauts- two whites
and a black- superimposed on the large head of an ape. This configuration
reminded me of some of Picabia’s paintings from the 1940′s, ones that were based
on the commercial illustration systems used for American movie posters and the
covers of hard-boiled detective paperbacks.

I looked at the rare comics and checked out the prices they were asking
for a couple of Tarzans- early Dell copies. One of them had a cover in which
the figure of Tarzan was a hand-drawn illustration superimposed over a
photograph of the jungle. I had only seen this technique used on two other comics,
one a Submariner and the other a Superman. For the Tarzan, the superimposition
created a seamlessness that made it hard to figure out what was really
happening. It was if the figure of Tarzan was a dream, a “real” illusion, and the
jungle was a film, the impression of an illusion. I like it. I thought that if
I could do this- use two different codes of representation simultaneously-
then I might be able to create what appeared to be an “art directed” picture.

After I left the Planet, I went over to a second-hand bookshop I know on
7th Street and Third Avenue. The lady who runs the place holds books for me.
She said she had been saving for me a first trade edition of Walter Percy’s
The Moviegoer. I’ve tried to read this book three times, but I could never get
past page 25. On the jacket flap of this particular edition there was a
summary; it said, “A house, a street, a city can be more itself on the screen than
in actuality.” These were probably the words of some junior editor’s
assistant priming the curious, hyping he uninformed with a kind of Westernized haiku.

It was the sort of blurb language that has become so familiar through television and
ad copy. Reading it, I thought of Lew Welch, the famous Beat poet, who used to support himself writing copy for clients’products. One of Welch’s haikus, before he walked off into the desert with is shotgun, was “Raid kills bugs dead.”

I will try The Moviegoer a fourth time, but not with this copy. The lady
who runs the store has marked the book $12. I give her a ten and that’s fine
with her. Fine for me, too, because it’s a $450 book in this condition.
This kind of “find” happens maybe once every six years.

The Barnard Bookstore is an out-of-print bookshop on 18th Street, west of
Fifth Avenue. Since I had 20 minutes to kill before seeing Vanishing Point at
the Cinema village, I thought I’d go in. Earlier in the week I had seen an
American edition of Mandingo, a huge, completely ridiculous copy of this treasure.
Usually books of this size are broken at the spine and creased and stained,
and even though this particular copy wasn’t exactly “jim mint”, it was certainly worth a second look. It had a fine bright dust jacket with an illustration that was new to me: a variation of the Southern white belle next to the black slave stud. I bought it. I was happy. This copy was going on my shelf right next to Naked on Roller Skates, Nigger Heaven and Jack Woodford’s Peeping Tom.

The owner had restocked the fiction since my last visit and besides
Mandingo, I also found The Casting Couch and Me, uninhibited memoirs of young
actors and actresses, and Thunder La Boom, a novel by Ann Steinhardt, who is quoted
on the jacket flap as claiming she became a stripper because it was the only
job that allowed her enough time to write. The jacket of Thunder La Boom had
a great out-of-focus photograph of a Las-Vegas-type show girl, frozen between
what appeared to be a bump and what probably became a grind.

The fifth floor of the Strand Bookstore is where they keep their rare books.
The stock is out in the open and reasonably priced. If they recognize you
they will leave you only to look. You can give the sellers your want lists, and
every once in a while they find something. Off to the side of the main room,
with fiction and literature, is a room where they keep movie, photography,
and autographed books. I head there first. There’s also a section on humor.
For some reason, humor has the lowest prices of any genre, perhaps because
there are so few collectors buying humor.

When I first started collecting cartoon and humor books, I was surprised
at how available and inexpensive they were. I was used to paying $300 for a
copy of Carrie, Stephen King’s first book. Or $150 for Gravity’s Rainbow. Or
$650 for Horseman Pass By, by Larry McMurtry, later to be filmed as Hud. I
find it’s always best to collect what you like and what no one else is
collecting. Two rules of thumb, so to speak. With the humor section of most
secondhand or rare bookstores, these two rules generally apply. For instance, a 1959
first printing of Morey Amsterdam’s Keep Laughing, signed and inscribed to
“Rosemarie” (the same “Rose” that starred with Amsterdam on the Dick Van Dyke
Show), was $7.50. Not only was the price extraordinary, but this copy had also
been scanned by the CIA. Throughout the book a “reading agent” (as in the movie
Three Days of the Condor) had annotated pages with such cryptic codes as
“CIA, Hayden, double-checks, an expected number, swim hole #3, clean 921.” Or
“Wut, Zuh, cherry daddy.” Needless to say, CIA read books are very rare. Most,
like books collected by university libraries, will never be available for
public purchase.

At Hollywood Book City in Los Angeles I bought a signed and inscribed
Joey Adams It Takes One To Know One for $10. Myron Cohen’s Laughing Out Loud was
$5, and Harry Hershfield’s Laugh Louder, Live Longer was fifty cents! More
recently, at Mendoza’s on Park Row, here in New York, I got three Jack Douglas
titles, all inscribed to Burt Bacharach, the newspaper columnist, and all for
$12. A 1952 first printing of Abner Dean’s Come As You Are cost me $6.
Dean’s cartoons and cross-eyed muses could be an unexpected discovery; back in 1943
psychiatrists started using Dean’s drawings for discussion with their
patients. An album of cartoons by Whitney Darrow, Jr. titled Please Pass The
Hostess, first edition, 1949, cost $10. Claimed the publisher: “This second album
for Darrow contains more laughs than the first. This is a matter of simple
arithmetic, i.e., it contains more drawings than the first.” At a street fair
recently, I found a book by Helen E. Hokinson called There Are Ladies Present
(Dutton, 1952 first printing) for $2. Hokinson was one of the few women
cartoonist who was consistently published throughout the ’20′s, ’30′s, ’40′s and
’50′s. The author of several cartoon albums- The Ladies, God Bless ‘Em, When Were
You Built and My Best Girls- Hokinson has one of the most recognizable styles
of any cartoonist in the 20th century. A people’s cartoonist, Hokinson is an
example of an artist I would call “eye-minded”.

Some people who collect books like to have a copy of the book with the
author’s signature in it, or maybe with an inscription, or even a presentation copy
with the publisher’s advance review slip laid in. Some want a deluxe copy
bound with marbled boards or gilt-stamped leather spine. Maybe a copy with folio
sheets showing various title versions. I don’t know, the wants go on and on:
uncorrected proofs, spiral-bound proofs, annotated
Proofs, manuscripts, letters, letters with the author’s intentions
I want the best copy. The only copy. The most expensive copy. I want
James Joyce’s Chamber Music. I want the 1907 version, the “variant”, the first
variant, the one with the lighter green binding, the taller trim size, laid
endpapers ass opposed to wove, the one with the correct folding signature C. I
want mine to be one of the advance review copies, one of 509 copies, the
publisher’s ALS to a certain British man of letters tipped to the front pastedown.
I want the tipped-in letter to be dated May 3, 1907. I want this date
because I know that the British Museum’s copy (destroyed during World War 11) was
received on May 8, and the Bodleian Library copy was received on May 11. I
want the earliest copy on record. I want the copy that is rarer than anyone had
previously dreamed of. I want the copy that dreams.

I remember finding a copy of Robert Frank’s The Americans, the Grove Press
edition, in a discard bin outside of Caldor’s in Bridgehampton, Long Island, New
York. There was a sign on the bin saying, “For Free”. The find was like
beach-combing. I thought I saw something, recognizing its outline up ahead:
black and white, rectangular, short title, a photograph, people on a bus. I got
closer. I felt myself moving by wading rather than swimming. The feeling had
something to do with anticipation. The book was mixed in with bars of soap,
odd-sized sneakers, children’s coloring books, calendars, and Harlequin
paperbacks with their covers torn off.

How did I get there? It’s not possible, I thought. Did some distributor
or store manager think there would be a customer for such a specific title?
True, they sell books inside, but usually the family or best-seller types.
Was it once remaindered for a dollar? I looked for a stamp or a red dot on the
bottom edge. Neither mark was there. Had it been inside at all? Or could
someone have simply read it and passed it on? I mean, what strange drift or
current made it end up here? I thought about desert islands. I thought about
the wave that brought it in. It must have been perfect.

Amazing, The Americans, in this town, outside this store, in this bin,
with a sign saying “For Free”. This doesn’t happen.

I read Michael Herr’s Dispatches before I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now. I saw Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner before I read Philip Dick’s Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I listen to the sound tracks of both movies in
my studio. A lot of the books I collect have a movie version. I get the
movies on VHS. It’s new, about six years new. They’re prerecorded and come in a
box the size of a large paperback. Sometimes I have the book and the movie
cassette on my shelf: Ninety-two in the Shade, Play It As It Lays, The Hustler,
The Subterraneans, Panic In Needle Park, In Cold Blood. When I look at them
both I don’t see a comparison, I don’t see study, I don’t see fancified
interest, I don’t see hobby or appreciation, I don’t see exhibition or
connoisseurship. The thing is, I don’t see these things on my shelf. I just stare at
them. They’re there everyday. They change me.

I don’t have many videocassettes, but I’m starting to collect them. I’m
collecting them for the same reasons as the books: I like having the lives of
these things around me. I like having lives I can go into and out when I’m
alone.

I put Nabokov’s Lolita and Kubrick’s Lolita next to each other. The book
is Monarch Select paperback, MS27. No image on the cover. All graphics.
Just the name, “Lolita” in red, stenciled in longhand against two background
bands of yellow and white. The movie is an MGM/CBS Home Video. It’s in a thin
cardboard slipcase. On the cover is a pastel illustration of Sue Lyon as
Lolita. She has orange, heart-shaped sunglasses on. There’s a lollipop in her
mouth. “Black comedy”, “Tragic farce”, “Comic despair” are italicized to the
bottom left of her head. On the back, small black-and-white stills of Quilty
and Humbert Humbert. The box reminds me that Nabokov screenplayed his own book.
The way the information is given is statistical. The packaging reminds me
of baseball cards.
I turn both covers out on the shelf. You could call the arrangement
highlighted. I think about how my collection is getting “eye-minded”.

One of my strangest finds was something of my own. In 1976 I had xeroxed a
14-page “list” called The Comedy Dungeon. I made about 50 copies, and I think
I left probably 40 of t hem at Jenny Holzer and Colleen Fitzgibbon’s
“Manifesto Show” two years later. There was one sentence to a page, typed, on green
xerox paper. The list was about World War I. It went like this: “Derain is in
a motorcycle unit in the north. Braque is a second lieutenant. Fernand Leger
is at the front with the supply corps. Albert Gleizes has been at the front
since the outbreak. Dufy is in Le Harve. Groult suffered an arm wound.
Duchamp-Villon is a medical aide. Tobeen is a man of iron serving in the
noncombatant corps. Glannattasion and Kisling are in foreign infantry regiments.
Drera is a corporal in a battery of one hundred in the Tenth Artillery. Rouveyre
is writing poems in honor of his gunner friends. Picabia is at the front as
a painter. G. de Chirico is waiting philosophically for the end of the war.”

It was one of my first stabs at sounding or looking like fiction, but
being about nonfiction. I found the copy in a stand outside the Pageant Book
Shop on 9th Street, near Third Avenue, right around the corner from where I lived
then. This book cost me a dollar. I like to think of it as one of those
“finds” that comes once every six years.

The copy was dog-eared and had the owner’s name inked in on the flyleaf.
Tina L’Hotsky was the name. Hey, I knew Tina. I am a great fan of her
Muchachas Espanolas Locas (or Crazy Spanish Girls). I own three copies of this
classic “artist’s book”.

If she doesn’t move to Seattle, the next time I see Tina in Los Angeles,
I’m going to present her with this copy of The Comedy Dungeon, annotated with
a joke. It’s going to be: “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said, ‘Tell me
everything’. I did, and now he’s doing my act”.
Richard Prince Phillips Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition
Catolgue1992 pp.170-175
Originally appeared “Bringing It All Back Home”, Art in America, 76
(September 1988), pp.29-33