And Yet Another Take on the Prince-Instagram Tizzy

It’s August. Probably not much interesting news to read, or if you’re on vacation and well past your vacation reading, here’s another take on Richard Prince’s appropriation of Instagram images. Enjoy!

Prince’s modifications to the Instagram photos—adding a comment to the captions, enlarging the screenshots, and printing the photographs on canvasses—might be considered a far cry from the transformative changes that he had made to Cariou’s photographs (which created a “fundamentally different aesthetic,” id. at 708), and are much less substantial than even the “minimal” changes that Prince made to the five outlier works in Cariou. It appears that Prince has “merely presented the same material [] in a new form,” which is generally “not transformative.”