Legal action against Richard Prince can proceed, after the American artist failed to get two lawsuits alleging copyright violation thrown out.
The disputes, both long-running, are brought by Donald Graham and Eric McNatt, both photographers whose images were used in Prince’s 2014 series New Portraits, a collection of other people’s Instagram photos which the artist had printed on canvas. Prince told the court that the work was ‘a serious and an amusing commentary on social media and art’.
Graham’s 1998 photograph, Rastafarian Smoking a Joint, and McNatt’s portrait of musician Kim Gordon, originally commissioned by Paper magazine, were both featured.
Prince and his galleries Blum & Poe and Gagosian, also named in the actions, had hoped that an earlier ruling – that the artist’s appropriation of other’s work amounted to ‘transformative use’ – would count in his favour. In 2013 a third photographer, Patrick Cariou, lost a case he had brought against Prince’s use of his photographs. In the artist’s 2008 series Canal Zone, Prince collaged Cariou’s images of Jamaica, sometime painting orbs over the faces of the original subjects. The judge concluded that an artwork does not need to comment on the source work to qualify as fair use.
Prince contends that the social media comments which he has manipulated to appear in the frame of his New Portraits are their ‘most important’ element. Graham and McNatt are now able to test that claim in court.
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