Mónica Yoldi ///

Richard Prince and the Appropriation of Elements of Mass Culture

Over the last decades the massive flood of images that we have been subjected to by the media, advertising and, above all, the reproduction and repetition of all sorts of iconography on the most varied supports, has distorted the meaning of the concept of originality in art. The power of originality is no longer connected to the uniqueness and irreproducibility of the image. Authorship and originality have undergone a transformation due to the new technologies. Nowadays any image can be copied, re-contextualised, sampled or reprocessed. In contemporary art reproduction has not only become a characteristic manner of doing, but also one of the main subjects for reflection.

One of the artists who appropriates media images in order to configure his works is the America Richard Prince (Panama, 1949) who, in taking possession of printed images appearing in magazines, catalogues or other publications and of the way in which they are shown, explores the manipulation that the mass media exert over consciousness and the strategies used for this purpose.