“They stole this from me! Well, I’m going to steal it right back.”

fvogue.jpgRichard Prince makes headlines again. Although we covered the photo dispute concerning some of Prince’s appropriated images exhibited at the Guggenheim last year (as well as artists upset over other artists appropriateing their work), this time it seems it is Prince himself who is a bit pissed that someone else is copying his aesthetic proclivities.

As you’d expect of a compulsive collector, Richard Prince’s study is full of stuff: you know the kind of thing – a Warhol Car Crash, a custom-bound first edition of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, an original copy of Sylvia Plath’s verse with handwritten notes by Ted Hughes. Prince isn’t gesturing at these, though, but at an issue of French Vogue with a cheesy-looking model on the cover – a pseudo Bad Girl, faux-sneering from the seat of a Harley. “It’s a ‘Girlfriend’!” Prince yelps, his voice breaking with indignation. “They stole this from me! Well, I’m going to steal it right back.”

The Independent has more on this story, wrapped in a rather dull and limp review of Prince’s upcoming show at the Serpentine Gallery here.