Lisa Phillips (1) (1954–)

Richard Prince emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists who worked with the margins of American subcultures and visual debris. Highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, cartoons, cowboys ("borrowed" from the Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of "Time Life" publications in New York, and had access to thousands of cut-up magazines of which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar, "Pop" imagery - updating Pop Art's homage to consumerism and its icons in the 1960s. Recently Prince's work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene. Prince is one of America's best-known artists internationally, and in 1992 was honoured with a one-person retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other museums which have held solo shows of Prince's work include the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; IVAM, Valencia; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich, among many others.… (altro)

The photos in here are amazing! Some are classics that I've seen many times, some were new to me! I definitely wasn't as familiar with the artwork of the beats, I have had more exposure to their writings. But to me, the pictures are the star of this book!
The written pieces were just so-so. It felt a little bit too much like a textbook on the beat culture. Still, during this time of civil unrest and upheaval, the chapter “Black Beats and Black Issues” really resonated with me! I read through that one twice!

Kind of ironic, that to me, the written portion of this book is very clinical, almost sterile. The beats wrote in a bee-bop sort of fashion, sort of jazzy, semi-free associative, and kind of wild. The pieces in here are more of a scholarly type. Not beat-like at all.
But, the beats changed, didn't they. William Burroughs in a Nike ad. Republican Clint Eastwood directing a film about Charlie Parker. Things change, things don't always make sense. Maybe that's kinda 'beat' after all!… (altro)