Wasting Time on the Internet (15 page)

Building on these earlier strategies, Richard Prince recently
turned his eye to the Internet when he began appropriating other people's Instagram photos in a series entitled
New Portraits
. He downloaded them without permission, printed them out on large canvases, and hung them on gallery walls, adding only a few comments in the comment stream, which he printed along with the images. Each carried a price tag of $90,000. Upon hearing this, the Instagram community went nuts, accusing Prince of exploiting regular people's photographs for his own financial benefit. One Instagrammer whose work was reproduced by Prince said, “What Prince is doing is colonizing and profiting off a territory of the Internet that was created by a community of young girls,” referring to the Instagram account of SuicideGirls, the alt-erotica stream with more than three million followers, from which Prince liberally poached. Yet what Prince did was perfectly legal. Instagram's privacy policy states: “Once you have shared User Content or made it public, that User Content may be re-shared by others.” Those offended might have been wise to read Flusser. They were fooled into thinking that their Instagram feeds are private photo albums of their most beloved and cherished images, rather than a façade that feeds a series of voracious apparatuses. What was as remarkable as the amount of money he made from appropriating other people's photos was the fact that with this one small gesture, our naiveté about the apparatus was so sharply critiqued and exposed.
*

In 2008, Prince made the series of paintings
Canal Zone
, which incorporated black-and-white photographs of Rastafarians that were taken by a little-known photographer named Patrick Cariou nearly a decade earlier. Prince took Cariou's photos and, like the Instagram pieces, blew them up large and printed them on canvas. But instead of just straight appropriations, he added and subtracted elements, at times cutting and pasting images on top of each other, other times isolating Cariou's images so that they floated in empty fields. Prince also painted heavily on top of some of the photos. In one of the most reproduced images from the series, Prince took a photo of a shirtless Rasta standing in a forest with dreadlocks draping down to the ground, and pasted George Harrison's Rickenbacker guitar in his hands. He also blotted out the Rasta's eyes and mouth with blue circles. The paintings generated more than $10 million worth of sales. Cariou, who made about $8,000, from his book, sued. The case went back and forth in court for several years, with the art world hoping for vindication of its long-standing tactics of appropriation, and the photography world hoping to regain control of their medium in a time of ubiquitous digital imagery. In 2013, the court decided in favor of Prince, saying he had transformed Cariou's photos and it was therefore considered fair use. The irony is that this battle was being played out during the digital age on two analog mediums: paintings stretched on canvas and photographs printed in books. At the heart of the case was neither painting nor money; it was
photography, which Flusser presciently called “the mother of all reproducible apparatuses.”

A few months ago, a friend pulled a book off of her bookshelf that was a new appropriation work by Prince, one as radical and daring as anything he'd done. The premise of the book was achingly simple: it was a reproduction of the first edition of
The Catcher in the Rye
, identical in every way to the iconic first edition, except that everywhere Salinger's name appeared, it was swapped for Prince's. The production value of the book was astonishingly high, a perfect facsimile of the original, right down to the thick, creamy paper stock; even the typeface on the book's pages was identical. The text on the dust jacket—replete with the familiar line drawing of the angry red horse—begins: “Anyone who has read Richard Prince's
New Yorker
stories, particularly
A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man
, and
For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,
will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is full of children.” It's a dead ringer through and through with the exception of the following disclaimer on the colophon page: “This is an artwork by Richard Prince. Any similarity to a book is coincidental and not intended by the artist.” The colophon concludes with: ©Richard Prince.

For Prince, the book was modestly priced: a few hundred bucks for a limited unsigned edition, with a copy signed by Prince selling for several thousand, matching the identical price of what the signed first edition by Salinger goes for on that day. Remarkably, Prince took a bunch of copies
of his pirated edition, spread them out on a blanket on the sidewalk in front of Central Park, and sold them for forty dollars each. It's unknown how many—if any—he sold or how a presumably befuddled public might have responded to this performance.

Prince is openly pirating what is rather valuable literary property—American literature—practically begging the estate of Salinger to sue him. One imagines that if Salinger's estate went after him, he'd have the money to settle with them. And, yet—probably because this is a low-profile, low-income-generating project—nothing ever happened. But this gesture, played out on a relatively small scale, on paper, is not really as much about Salinger as it is about the status of the cultural artifact in the digital age, its infinite reproducibility, and our changing notion of authorship and authenticity in the twenty-first century.

Images on the web take on a Wittgenstein-like character, flickering back and forth between the semantic and the visual, being both at once. We search for images based on key words that summon images, yet it's in this interval—between typing and clicking—that the correspondence between the two begins to slip. I enter the word “red” into Google Images and the first result is of a red square from
Wikipedia. I assume that the image is from the Wikipedia entry to the color “red” but when I go to the page, I find that it is, in fact, the entry for “Red flag (politics),” which reminds me of Wittgenstein's claim that “the two propositions, ‘Red is a primary color' and ‘Red is a color in many flags,' wear the same linguistic dress.” The tension between language and image on the web is the subject of a recent project by the London-based artists King Zog (Felix Heyes and Benjamin West) called
Google, Volume 1,
which takes the entire
Oxford English Dictionary
and replaces every word with the first image displayed when searched on Google Images. The result is a 1,328-page tome that begins, obviously enough, with an image of an aardvark and ends with a mysterious scientific-looking diagram, which the book's index tells me is zymase, an enzyme that catalyzes sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide.

When I search the book for the image “red” trying to find the
r
's I flip through the pages and stumble across an image of a red flag—a Nazi flag, to be specific—and think that I have found the entry for “red.” It is only when I look to one side of it and see an image of a “sweater,” which is followed by a broom “sweeping” that I realize I'm looking at the entry for “swastika.” I flip backward, then, trying to find the
r
's and when I do, I land on the page with a poster for the movie
The Recruit
, followed by a medical illustration of a “rectum.” Nearby, I see an image of an open book with the words “verso” and “recto” on it and I know I must be getting close. Sure enough, I turn the page and there is
the image for “red,” which is not a solid square of red referencing a red flag, as Google Images today tells me it is, but instead is a movie poster for a film called
Red
. Evidently back in 2013, the day the authors sought the first entry for “red” in Google Images, the movie poster was the top hit. Today, things have changed. Tomorrow—or even later this afternoon—the top hit on Google Images for “red” might very well change again. Printed in an edition of only three hundred copies, each subsequent edition will scoop the top images search terms from that printing date, resulting in an entirely different book each time it's published.

Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman produced a similar project called
I'm Google
, which is a collection of images she finds on the web and meticulously organizes according to their formal and lyrical properties. Displayed in a seemingly endless scroll, the project visually resembles both Google Images and Pinterest, which, according to her artist statement, “results visually in a colorful grid that slowly changes as the viewer scrolls through it. Images of houses being demolished transition into images of buildings on fire, to forest fires, to billowing smoke, to geysers, to bursting fire hydrants, to fire hoses, to spools of thread. The site is constantly updated week after week, batch by batch, sometimes in bursts, sometimes very slowly.” At first glance, Kelberman's project feels like she created the most perfect algorithm, one that is able to match perfectly the semantic and visual qualities of images in the most poetic fashion. Yet the truth is that she's meticulously picking and arranging these
images by hand, one after the next. In this way, she's closer to Christian Marclay's
The Clock
than she is Google's search function that allows you to find images that are visually similar images. Google is a smart formal algorithm but it misses the nuances of what only a human can bring to a project: humor, subtlety, irony, perversity, playfulness, and poetry. It's not enough to simply “raid the icebox,” and display the treasures because they are there. Instead, it's Kelberman's artistic sensibility—her “order of the catalogue,” as Walter Benjamin would put it—that makes a striking counterpoint to the “confusion of a library.”

Over the course of the year when I was named MoMA's first poet laureate in 2013, I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in the museum among great works of art. Prior to my appointment, as a visitor, I would stand in front of certain paintings, lost for what seemed to be an eternity, completely oblivious of my surroundings. For me, the content of MoMA was its glorious collection; the apparatus surrounding the collection was something I barely noticed. But once I was there every week, I began to see how MoMA itself—its history and its narrative of modern art, the fact that it was MoMA—was influencing what I was looking at and the ways in which I was seeing it.

I found myself filtering my experiences through the lens
of “institutional critique,” an art practice that like Flusser's apparatus takes as its subject matter the way institutions frame and control discourses surrounding the works of art they exhibit rather than focusing on the content of the works themselves. A more traditional approach would be to isolate a work of art and to appreciate its aesthetic values, while ignoring the context in which it is being displayed and the factors that brought it there. Like Flusser, institutional critique claims that the structures surrounding the works are actually what gives the work much of its meaning, oftentimes controlling the reception of a work in ways we as viewers are unaware of. While institutional critique began in the museum, the practice evolved over time to include everything from the production and distribution of art to an examination of the corporate offices or collectors' homes where the art was hung. By the 1980s, it roped in art criticism, academic lectures, and art's reception in the popular press. Around the same time, art schools began offering classes in poststudio practice, where the study of institutional critique became an act of making art in and of itself.

So you get works like Hans Haacke's 1970
MoMA Poll
, which was literally a poll that asked viewers: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?” Haacke then provided two Plexiglas boxes into which the
YES
or
NO
ballots were cast. While, aesthetically, the piece fit into the information-based art of the period, Haacke meant to shed light on the fact that Nel
son Rockefeller was a member of MoMA's board, thereby making visible the normally hidden play of money, power, and politics behind the institution. Another tactic is to take objects from a museum's collection and rearrange them in ways that highlight the biases of the collection. For instance, in 1993 the artist Fred Wilson critiqued the Maryland Historical Society's collection in relationship to Maryland's history of slavery. For this show, he regrouped specific objects from the museum in order to speak of, in Wilson's words, “a history which the museum and the community wouldn't talk about: the history of the exclusion and abuse that African-American people experienced in that area.” Other works have focused on the physical institution itself. Andrea Fraser, a performance artist, often acts as a docent, leading groups at museums on false tours, not of the works on the walls, but of the security systems, water fountains, and cafeterias. In 2003, Fraser performed what was perhaps the ultimate work of institutional critique in which a collector paid twenty thousand dollars to sleep with her, “not for sex,” according to Fraser, but “to make an artwork.”