Richard Prince - Signed High Times, September 2016
Richard Prince
High Times, September 2016
Magazine cover, signed in gold marker
14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 27.9 cm)
Framed
In the summer of 2016, High Times approached Richard Prince to contribute original cover images for five editions marking the publication's anniversary — and Prince, characteristically, went with it. The result was a meeting of two American vernaculars: the counterculture monthly that had documented the margins of the republic since 1974, and the artist who had spent four decades raiding those same margins for everything they were worth. The cover image, drawn from Prince's Hippie Drawings series — figures of indeterminate gender, feral color, wide staring eyes — carries the naive charge of outsider art filtered through one of the sharpest conceptual minds in postwar American painting. Signed in gold marker. The gesture lands with particular weight here: gold on newsprint, luxury touching disposability, the fine art imprimatur pressed directly onto the object that was never supposed to outlast the month.