A Photo Editor - Jim Krantz May Have Finally Gotten His Attribution

Glad to see Jim getting the attention he deserves. Read the whole article at APE, it is really interesting.

A Photo Editor - Jim Krantz May Have Finally Gotten His Attribution:

"APE: Do you feel like what happened with Richard Prince changed peoples opinion about your work or brought it more recognition?

The general consensus from over 200 emails that I’ve gotten since that article ran is very negative and people were actually pissed off as far as what he’s done and how he goes about his business. There’s a fine line between appropriation and plagiarism. A lot of the people who write me are photographers and artists and they feel vulnerable to this because they project themselves into the situation I find myself in.

In general I’m not happy about it and artists are not happy about it. Now, if you go talk to a gallerist about it they will look at it as American iconography and describe him as a collector of images. I kind of understand if you take the whole Ad with the Marlboro words with the copy, the header and the cigarette pack stripped out. As opposed to what he’s doing which is stripping all the copy away so you have the photograph in its purest form. That’s a very different thing because at that point it’s not an Ad, which is a departure from what I’ve done, it’s literally exactly what I’ve done. The context is everything. And in the context with all the copy and everything else my work creates a new entity in itself. When he eliminates all of that, it goes back to the core image, which is mine, so yeah I don’t see this as really being a photograph of an advertisement. It’s really just the purest form of the art out of context. That’s exactly how I shoot it, I’m not thinking about cigarettes, I’m not thinking about anything more than fantastic art."

On a personal note. Richard Prince is a no-talent hack... and it says so much about the crap of the NY artists that they say this guy is worth more than a couple of millions in damages. What a crock of crap. Prince encapsulates everything wrong with art today.