Artist Disavows Ivanka Trump Work

The NY Times is reporting artist Richard Prince has returned a $36,000 payment to an art advisory who approached him about a doing a painting of Ivanka Trump and has disavowed the work. One art expert stated he did not think the painting would now be considered "illegitimate" by collectors or museums, and because of the notoriety may have actually increased its value.

Certainly an interesting appraisal question?

The NY Times reports

Ivanka Trump is an avid, adventurous collector of contemporary art who often shows off pieces from her collection on Instagram by blue-chip artists like Dan Colen, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince. But one of those works has suddenly, and unexpectedly, become a piece of political art.

Mr. Prince, in an act of protest against her father, President-elect Donald J. Trump, said in an interview Thursday that he had returned a $36,000 payment that he received in 2014 for a work that depicts Ms. Trump and that she posed next to in an Instagram post. Mr. Prince first announced his decision in a series of tweets, saying that he was disavowing the work. In language that echoed Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, he called his own work “fake” and added, “I denounce.”

Mr. Prince, one of the most revered artists of his generation and a provocateur who sometimes rattles people by freely borrowing imagery from pop-culture sources, can be a prankster on Twitter, playing a kind of fictionalized version of himself, using social media as a form of performance art. But in this case, he appears to be playing it straight. In the interview, he said he decided recently that he could no longer countenance a piece of his residing in the collection of the Trump family.

“It was just an honest way for me to protest,” Mr. Prince said. “It was a way of deciding what’s right and wrong. And what’s right is art, and what’s wrong is not art. I decided the Trumps are not art.”

The piece that Mr. Prince made was part of a highly publicized, and later controversial, series in which he turned screenshots of Instagram posts into printed paintings — a body of work that functioned as a social-media-age update of influential earlier work that he did rephotographing advertising shots and magazine pages and radically recontextualizing them in galleries and museums.

Mr. Prince said that in 2014 he was approached by an art adviser, whom he declined to name, with a request that he make a painting based a post from Ms. Trump’s Instagram feed.

“I don’t do commissions, and so what I said to the guy was, ‘Let me look at her feed and see if I like it, and if I do I’ll do it,’” Mr. Prince said. “I found an image of her that looked like it was made up. It looked like the kind of thing I was interested in.” He added, of Ms. Trump: “I don’t care who she is. I care more about who I think she is.”

He continued: “She posts a lot of pictures of herself. It means I get a whole bunch of choices. I don’t have to meet her. It’s not Richard Avedon. I don’t have to invite someone over to my studio or meet them. I just find an image that I can imagine is what somebody is really like.” Of his interest in Instagram in general, he said: “It’s like going down a rabbit hole. It’s like a giant magazine. It’s frankly a lot of fun.”

Mr. Prince said that on Wednesday he had returned the original price of the Ivanka piece to the art adviser who had requested it. It’s unclear whether Ms. Trump herself or someone close to her bought the work, which uses an Instagram post with an image showing her getting her hair done. (In the Instagram post where she poses with the work, she thanks Mr. Prince and comments that she loves the piece.)

Ms. Trump, through a spokesman, declined to comment on Thursday. But a person in her circle, who was not authorized to speak about the matter because of the personal nature of her art purchases and collection, said the money was in the process of being returned by Mr. Prince.

Asked if he thought his disavowal would have any effect on the piece’s status as a legitimate Richard Prince work or on its market value, Mr. Prince said: “Whether it will affect anything is not the point. It’s a way of me saying to them I don’t want my work in your possession. I don’t want anything to do with your family.”

There is ample historical precedent for artists declaring works null and void, but not much evidence that they have the power to withdraw a work once it has fully entered the public realm. In 1963, for example, the sculptor Robert Morris, angered that the architect Philip Johnson was late in paying for a work, wrote a kind of affidavit negating the “aesthetic quality and content” of the piece. But both the piece and the manifesto are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art as Morris works.

Joshua Holdeman, a Manhattan art adviser and a former vice chairman at Sotheby’s, said he believed Mr. Prince’s excommunication of the work would probably not cause collectors or museums to treat it as illegitimate in the long run and he added that it might indeed increase its value.

“As far as the market is concerned, if an artist says a work isn’t by him, but it’s clear that he made it and presented it as his work, well it kind of is what it is,” Mr. Holdeman said. “My intuition about this is that when history plays out, this will probably end up being a more culturally rich object than if this whole episode hasn’t happened.”

Source: The NY Times