“Richard Prince is an artist who understands the essential connection between the hysterical and the sublime. He digs the depth of the joke. He knows that it’s not only okay to be funny, it’s mandatory.”  
—Glenn O’Brien

New York-based artist Richard Prince stands as one of the most revered and controversial figures in contemporary art. Executed in 2011, this dynamic collage work draws from the artist’s career-long investigation of popular culture, mass media, and appropriation. It presents a layered narrative that situates the work as both a continuation and evolution of his iconic Joke Paintings, a series at the heart of his artistic legacy. Prince rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a collective of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, who critically examined the media-saturated landscape of American culture in the 1970s. He began his career re-photographing magazine and newspaper advertisements, adopting the images as his own and recontextualising them as art objects. Prince’s continued use of provocative and appropriated imagery has stirred controversy and debate around pressing questions related to the distinctions between high art and kitsch, consumer culture, and questions of authorship in the art world.
 

The Joke Paintings represent a significant shift in Prince’s practice, transitioning from the image-focused reproduction of existing found imagery to text-based compositions. Faithful to his process of appropriation, Prince started this new series in 1984 by tracing Whitney Darrow Jr.’s cartoons from the New Yorker onto small pieces of paper and selling them for $10 each. He referred to these pictures as ‘jokes’ and soon found himself gravitating more toward the texts than the cartoons themselves. Prince began isolating the jokes from their visual contexts, using them as stand-alone elements or pairing the text with distinct imagery. This departure reflected the artist’s growing interest in humour as a cultural artefact - one that encapsulates the societal attitudes, anxieties, and taboos of a specific time and place.

 

The Joke Revisited: Context and Continuity
 

In Untitled, Prince revisits a joke central to his practice: ‘Man walking out of a house of ill repute. Man, that’s what I call a business… you got it, you sell it, and you still got it.’ This quip first appeared in one of the artist’s earliest Joke Paintings, What a Business from 1989, exemplifying the artist’s strategy of recycling culturally resonant humour. As Jerry Saltz notes, this joke, which remarks on the transactional nature of sex work, ironically mirrors the role of the artist, who ‘has it (the work of art), sells it, and still has it (talent).ⁱ

Prince reused the same joke just five years later in The Literature Rack from 1994. Here, the artist overlaps various cartoons and texts using a silkscreen technique, with the joke sectioned off at the bottom of the work. Nancy Spector, in her analysis of Prince’s hybrid compositions, remarks that these works illuminate ‘the hostility, fear, and shame fuelling much American humour.ⁱⁱ Through a juxtaposition of humour and critique, Prince invites viewers to confront the darker undercurrents of mass media and popular culture. The re-appropriation of the joke speaks to the artist’s continued preoccupation with the symbols and techniques of mass media consumption. As Lisa Phillips notes, ‘The best jokes have been around forever. Prince just gives them a fresh coat of paint.ⁱⁱⁱ
 

Aesthetic and Technical Innovations
 

While Untitled draws on earlier Joke Paintings for its textual content, its formal qualities distinguish it from this body of work. From afar, the background appears as an abstract gridded pattern of blue brushstrokes interspersed with flashes of pink and white paint. However, upon closer investigation, this geometric plane emerges as a collage of 1950s and 60s pulp fiction book covers, each featuring illustrations of nurses. Drawing from the artist’s pivotal series of Nurse paintings Untitled returns to this central motif, resulting in a composition which combines some of the artist’s most recognisable themes and techniques
 

The collaged mosaic contrasted with the blue acrylic paint and screen-printed text creates a layered visual texture which recalls the composition of Prince’s 2008 work Another Girl featured in the renowned Broad Collection in Los Angeles. Characteristic of his earlier practice, Prince appropriates images of popular culture, yet, in these later works, the visual media presents as far less dominant. Rather, the joke printed atop the collage in bold, outlined block letters takes centre stage. The truncated text, cut off at both ends of the canvas, evokes a sense of perpetuity, mirroring the cyclical nature of cultural humour and its endless reinterpretation.

 

Significance Within Prince’s Oeuvre
 

Prince’s Joke Paintings encapsulate his fascination with the intersections of popular culture, art, power, and identity, demonstrating the very real attitudes and tensions that exist thinly veiled behind the curtain of humour. From its conceptual rigour to its technical execution, Untitled serves as both a reflection on and an extension of his lifelong dedication to this series. This work not only reaffirms Prince’s position as a master provocateur but also invites collectors to engage with a piece that epitomises the enduring relevance of his art. As with the best of his Joke Paintings, Untitled challenges viewers to consider the complexities of authorship, authenticity, and the commodification of culture.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Untitled is a pivotal work from Richard Prince’s renowned Joke Paintings series, which has defined his career since the 1980s. These text-based works challenge notions of authorship and originality while probing the social truths that underscore popular jokes.
• Prince has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. 
• Prince’s Joke Paintings are included in major institutional collections, such as The Broad, Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. His works are also included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
  
   

ⁱ Jerry Saltz, ‘Sleight Slight of Hand’, Arts Magazine, vol. 64, no. 5, January 1990, p. 2.

ⁱⁱ Nancy Spector, Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 37.

ⁱⁱⁱ Glenn O’Brien, ‘The Joke of the New’, in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of Art, New York, 1992, p. 117.