Untitled 1991

Editor: This Untitled piece by Richard Prince… it's a drawing, and it's a bit unsettling, with the crude sketch of a woman and jokes scrawled across the page. And then there's that Playboy bunny skull at the bottom. How do you interpret this work? Curator: Prince often appropriates imagery from popular culture. The Playboy logo here, combined with the jokes, points to a commentary on the male gaze and its relationship to mortality. Consider how the art world, too, participates in the circulation and validation of these images. What do you think Prince is trying to expose about the consumption of these tropes? Editor: I guess he's showing how these images, and the jokes, are kind of… empty. They’re about something darker than they seem. Curator: Precisely. And recognizing that allows us to understand the broader cultural forces at play.