Richard Prince and the Boundaries of Appropriation

The Cowboy, the Screenshot, and the Courtroom: Richard Prince’s Legacy

From cowboy ads to Instagram screenshots, Richard Prince built a career on turning other people’s pictures into his own. In the process, he forced courts, museums, and collectors to confront a pressing question: what truly counts as a new work of art in the age of memes and AI?

A Ferragamo ad in Vogue magazine rephotographed by the R9 Media Photo Collective for inclusion in this article.

Richard Prince, Appropriation, and the Law in the Age of AI

When Richard Prince began rephotographing Marlboro advertisements in the late 1970s, the gesture was at once simple and radical. He took images meant to sell cigarettes—rugged cowboys posed against big skies—cropped them, rephotographed them, and placed them in the gallery. In doing so, he stripped away their commercial frame and forced them into the domain of art, where questions of authorship, originality, and cultural meaning came to the fore. The act was neither technically innovative nor materially complex, yet it was conceptually seismic. In Prince’s hands, the already familiar image became estranged, uncanny, and newly charged.

From those early appropriations forward, Prince’s career has become a barometer for the viability—and the limits—of appropriation as an art form. More than Sherrie Levine, whose direct rephotographs of Walker Evans were shielded from litigation by the theoretical discourse of the 1980s, or Andy Warhol, whose Pop Art silkscreens were absorbed into canon before copyright law caught up, Prince has dragged the debate into the courtroom. His battles with photographers, estates, and social-media users have not only defined his practice but reshaped the legal landscape for contemporary art.

The Precedent: Cariou v. Prince

The defining moment came in the late 2000s, when Prince’s Canal Zone series used dozens of images from Patrick Cariou’s book Yes Rasta. Cariou sued for infringement. In 2011, a federal district court judge ruled against Prince, finding his alterations insufficiently transformative. That decision sent a shockwave through the art world: if Prince could not claim fair use, could anyone?

But in 2013 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed much of that ruling. Twenty-five of the thirty contested works were deemed transformative, because they created a different aesthetic and conveyed a distinct expression. The case settled before the remaining five could be retried. The outcome was widely seen as a victory not only for Prince but for appropriation art at large, confirming that the act of recontextualization could itself constitute transformation under copyright law.

The Complication: Warhol v. Goldsmith

For a decade, Cariou stood as a protective shield. But in 2023, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Lynn Goldsmith. At issue was Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Prince (the musician), derived from a Goldsmith photograph. The Court held that licensing the silkscreen for a magazine cover was not fair use, because it usurped Goldsmith’s own licensing market. “Transformative” purpose, the justices signaled, could not outweigh market substitution.

This decision cast a long shadow backward on Prince’s practice. The “new meaning” defense that rescued Canal Zone no longer guarantees success if the secondary use overlaps commercially with the original. Prince’s later works—especially his near-verbatim “New Portraits” taken from Instagram screenshots—suddenly look more vulnerable.

The Instagram Problem

Prince’s New Portraits series, exhibited in 2014–2015, consisted of screenshots of other people’s Instagram posts, lightly modified with his own cryptic comments. Presented on large canvases, they sold for six-figure sums. Lawsuits followed. Unlike the Marlboro ads or Cariou’s Rastafarians, which Prince materially altered, these works often involved little more than a screenshot and a caption.

Courts so far have been reluctant to dismiss these claims out of hand. In Graham v. Prince, involving a photographer’s image re-presented in New Portraits, the judge refused to grant summary judgment, meaning the case must be tried. The precedent from Cariou helps, but Warhol looms: if the work simply reproduces an image for the same market function, it may fall outside fair use.

A Ralph Lauren ad in Vogue magazine rephotographed by the R9 Media Photo Collective for inclusion in this article.

Museums and Collectors: Playing It Safe

For museums and collectors, Prince’s controversies have become case studies in risk management. Curators now routinely prepare internal fair-use memos before acquiring or exhibiting works that appropriate copyrighted material. They lean on guidelines from the College Art Association and the Association of Art Museum Directors, both of which stress the need for a clearly articulated transformative purpose. Wall texts and catalog essays take on added importance, framing works not as substitutes for the original images but as critical commentary.

Collectors, meanwhile, have learned to demand indemnities and non-infringement warranties from sellers. The market continues to value Prince highly, but legal exposure is priced in. Works that resemble Canal Zone—visibly altered, obviously critical—are more financeable than New Portraits, whose minimal intervention feels riskier after Warhol.

Appropriation in the Age of Memes

One could argue that Prince’s Instagram series marked a dead end. By the mid-2010s, everyone was already re-posting, screenshotting, and remixing online. What once shocked—the idea of taking someone else’s image and recontextualizing it—had become quotidian. If anything, Prince’s gesture felt less like critique and more like parasitism, extracting art-world capital from practices that ordinary users do for free.

Yet Prince’s work also anticipated the logic of memes. Memes thrive by repetition, recontextualization, and communal authorship. They exemplify appropriation as a collective, participatory act. The difference is that memes resist commodification, while Prince’s canvases reassert scarcity. That tension—between open circulation and private ownership—is now central to the cultural economy.

AI and the Return of the Question

Generative AI adds another layer. Like Prince, AI systems “rephotograph” the archive, recombining existing images into new outputs. Like Prince, they raise questions of transformation versus theft. And like Prince, they will force courts to decide: is this new expression, or unlawful substitution?

Prince’s career, in retrospect, looks like a prelude. His legal battles serve as a blueprint for how courts may treat AI image-making: transformation will be measured not only by aesthetic difference but by whether the new work supplants the original creator’s market.

The Future: Context Over Content

The trajectory is clear. Appropriation can survive, but only when it is more than mimicry. Courts, museums, and collectors increasingly converge on a shared test: does the work serve a new purpose, does it produce a new meaning, and does it avoid competing with the original’s market? Prince’s early Marlboro rephotographs still pass easily. His Instagram screenshots do not.

The irony is that Prince’s practice, once avant-garde, may now seem retrograde compared to the communal fluidity of meme culture and the algorithmic recombinations of AI. Yet his career remains essential. He showed how appropriation could be both art and lawsuit, critique and commodity, provocation and precedent. He mapped the contested terrain where images circulate, value is assigned, and law struggles to keep up.

In the end, Prince’s legacy may not be a body of untouchable masterpieces but a set of open questions—about ownership, authorship, and meaning—that will continue to shape the fate of art in the digital commons.

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Bibliography & Further Reading

Case Law

• Cariou v. Prince, 714 F.3d 694 (2d Cir. 2013).

• Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince et al., 784 F. Supp. 2d 337 (S.D.N.Y. 2011).

• Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. ___ (2023).

• Graham v. Prince, 265 F. Supp. 3d 366 (S.D.N.Y. 2017).

Legal and Critical Commentary

• Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. MIT Press, 2003.

• Carroll, Michael W. “Copyright’s Creative Hierarchy in the Age of Remix.” North Carolina Law Review 80, no. 3 (2002): 566–646.

• Jaszi, Peter, and Patricia Aufderheide. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. University of Chicago Press, 2011.

• Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Sage, 2016.

On Richard Prince

• Brooks, Rosetta, ed. Richard Prince. Phaidon Press, 2003.

• Phillips, Lisa. Richard Prince: Spiritual America. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007.

• Rugoff, Ralph. Richard Prince. Serpentine Gallery, London, 2008.

On Appropriation and Related Artists

• Crimp, Douglas, ed. Pictures. Artists Space, 1977.

• Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. MIT Press, 1985.

• Levine, Sherrie. After Walker Evans. Metro Pictures, exhibition catalog, 1981.

• Warhol, Andy. Andy Warhol: A Retrospective. Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

On Museums, Collecting, and Policy

• Association of Art Museum Directors. Copyright Guidelines for U.S. Museums. AAMD, 2022.

• College Art Association. Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. CAA, 2015.