Richard Prince

Richard Prince (born 1949) is one of the most influential—and controversial—artists of the appropriation art movement. Since the late 1970s, he has built a career by rephotographing advertisements, magazine images, social media posts, and other existing works, challenging traditional ideas of originality, authorship, and copyright. His most significant legal battle came in Cariou v. Prince (2013), when photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince for using dozens of his photographs without permission in the Canal Zone series. In a landmark decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that most of Prince's works were sufficiently "transformative" to qualify as fair use, fundamentally reshaping American copyright law for contemporary artists. While celebrated by many as a victory for artistic freedom, the case remains deeply divisive, with critics arguing it weakened protections for photographers and creators. Prince has continued to court controversy, most notably with his New Portraits series, in which he enlarged Instagram posts, added his own comments, and sold the resulting works for hundreds of thousands of dollars—once again igniting debates over appropriation, ownership, and where inspiration ends and infringement begins.