Marlboro, 1973 - Framed Advertisement

Marlboro, 1973

Vintage two-page original print advertisement, framed
22¾ × 17 inches (57.8 × 43.2 cm)

The cowboy was always a fiction. Philip Morris knew it. Richard Prince knew it too — which is why, beginning in the late 1970s, he started rephotographing Marlboro ads from magazines and calling them his own, producing some of the most consequential works in postwar American art by doing almost nothing at all. This 1973 two-page spread predates Prince's interventions by half a decade, which means it arrives without mediation: no rephotography, no conceptual apparatus, no gallery wall text to tell you what to think. Just the original artifact, the one Prince was looking at, framed. The cowboy, the landscape, the cigarette. The American West as a product. The most seductive lie the twentieth century told about itself, in its original printing. Framed in the Prince manner — which is to say, treated as exactly what it always was: a work of art that didn't know it yet.