Jokes and cartoons are part of any mainstream magazine. Especially magazines like the New Yorker or Playboy. They're right up there with the editorial and advertisements and table of contents and letters to the editors. They're part of the layout, part of the "sights" and "gags." Somet.mes s they're political, somet.mes s they just make fun of everyday life. Once in a while they drive people to protest [...]
R ichard Prince’s witty appropriations of American culture have cemented him as one of the most important artists of the twenty-first century. Sparking heated dialogue about the limits of appropriations, he reproduces images in the mainstream media to capture America’s idiosyncrasies while highlighting the media’s derivative nature and pervasiveness. He shows that all images are reiterations of each other, but by being positioned in new contexts, they become their own redefined entities. Influenced by Pop art, Prince embraces the brash world of common culture, advertising, and mass media to present new images imbued with irony which serve to critique society. A provocateur, Prince forces us to question the building blocks of American identity.
"Favorite Richard Prince joke?" Christopher Wool, “I must be in the wrong joke.”
Artists have widely used humor as a device to stimulate their readers, viewers, and listeners to laugh and reflect. He began his iconic Joke series in 1986, series exploiting American humor to explore the life of middle-class America. In Untitled, Jokes, Prince presents in bold text without spaces a short and absurd narrative. He ingeniously relies on the viewer’s understanding of a joke to read the text with the appropriate cadence and rhythm to deliver the punchline. The canvas becomes the script and the reader the comic. Like genre painting, these works unveil a shared unconscious and depict the everyday in their banality while existing as high-brow artworks. As with his early work with images, Prince appropriates popular culture and shows it in a new light that perceptively encapsulates American identity.
