Homework 4

"Is Richard Prince a genius, or does Richard Prince suck?"
Richard Prince is a con man - "a man who cheats". The thing about con men, it that to get away with their scheming and their heists, they must be geniuses. But the difference between a con man and Albert Einstein is that Einstein used his genius for good (well, the Manhattan Project is a touchy subject...). In order to collect the photographs for his book Yes, Rasta, Cariou spent six years in Jamaica for the project. By January 2010, the total profit that Cariou had earned from his book was $8,000. Yes, that's a lot of money...but for six years? Not only that, but given that Prince earned $100,000 from appropriation of these images - the amount looks even more pale for comparison.

The way that I perceive this scenario is that Richard Prince let Cariou go out and do the dirty work - he was the one who spent endless time and money collecting the photographs - and then swooped in to exploit Cariou's labor for his own profit. In nature, this type of creature is called a parasite. If Prince had appropriated images for nonprofit purposes (like many students have done in this AVT class), it would be a different story. If my memory serves me correctly, "profit" is not one of the acceptable circumstances for fair use. Money is absolutely a matter here. Making a living as an artist is difficult, and Richard Prince essentially screwed over someone in the same boat. Given the immense profits that Prince was able to earn from his appropriation, he should have worked out some type of commission deal with Cariou.

In my own life, I've never been too concerned with issues of copyright. But that's because I haven't really created anything that's worth stealing. My field of interest (career-wise) is in writing, and that field is more difficult to "appropriate" in any way. Because of this, I predict that I'll have little trouble with copyright infringement in the future.