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Lot Essay
“No one that I know had ever painted a joke in the art world. It was a very radical subject matter. And if you didn’t like the joke, maybe you liked the painting. And if you didn’t like the painting, maybe you liked the joke.” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince,” in Donald Graham V. Richard Prince, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, p. 236).
Richard Prince’s The Wrong Joke is an important early example of his Joke Paintings, the series that heralded the artist’s first reckoning with critical and popular success. Appropriating the Minimalist painting style then current in the 1980s, Prince painted found jokes revolving around the popular traveling salesman motif favored by Borscht Belt comics. The Joke Paintings mark a radical point of departure for both Prince and American contemporary art writ large. Renouncing both the Minimalist legacy as well as the bombastic scale of the contemporaneous Neo-Expressionist painters, Prince achieved what Nancy Spector terms an “antimasterpiece,” skillfully inverting the art world’s essential value system (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 39). As the artist himself later recollected, “I mean, can you imagine in 1986, when I made my first Joke painting, nobody had ever [painted a joke]—I mean jokes were something that you heard... What I did was I changed the hearing of a generic Borscht Belt joke, jokes that I grew up with... and I painted them. I painted jokes, and I believe the Jokes are right up there with Rothko” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince” in Donald Graham V. Richard Prince, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, p. 235).
In The Wrong Joke, Prince silkscreens his red joke in six uniform lines at an intimate scale in the direct center of the blue-painted canvas. The discordant scale between text and support forces the viewer into close proximity with the painting in order for the work to be made legible. Prince first began experimenting with the joke format in 1984, when he started writing one-liners on paper with pen, selling them for $10 each. He explored copying cartoons with caption and image intact, as well as swapping images and texts, before finally landing on his monochrome painted format. This diametric change in practice away from the photographic method of the previous decade was critical to his formation as an artist, introducing a greater sense of the personal as well as a greater sense of the artist’s hand into his works, which had previously felt devoid of a creative presence. As Prince noted, “I’m not associated with the hand... beginning the jokes was like starting over” (R. Prince, quoted in L. Philips, “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 41).
The joke itself, culled from the thousands which Prince recorded for decades in a mental repertoire, is itself a metajoke, relying on the audience’s familiarity with archetypal traveling salesman jokes for its unexpected punchline, which operates on a surprising shift in gender dynamics. The salesman ends the line addressing not the farmer but the viewer, breaking the fourth wall with his announcement: “I’m in the wrong joke.” This ‘wrong joke’ appears to be among Prince’s favorite out of the dozens he has appropriated over his career. The joke appears in numerous other works, including several other monochromes, drawings, and The Salesman and the Farmer (1989, private collection). In December of 1987, the year the present work was made, Prince published the article “The Traveling Salesman” in Artforum, where he printed both the text of the present joke as well as a close variant. Discussing the importance of comedy in Prince’s work, Glenn O’Brien states: “Richard Prince is an artist who understands the essential connection between the hysterical and the sublime. He digs the depth of the joke. He knows it’s not only okay to be funny, it’s mandatory” (G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, op. cit., p. 117). With the joke in The Wrong Joke, Prince leverages the subversion of his audience’s expectations, in tandem with his choice of an almost comical font size for his text, to expertly reach the intersection of the hysterical and the sublime.
1987 proved Prince’s pivotal year. In March, he was featured on the cover of Art in America, garnering the attention of Barbara Gladstone, who began representing him soon thereafter. This rapid rise allowed him to shift his attention to painting for the first time. “His interest in making paintings grew, and when he did exhibit paintings they were large, monochromatic canvases, with single jokes silkscreened in different colors in the center—as minimal, mechanical and blunt as the early rephotograph had been. They seemed to be a joke on painting... Prince was beginning to test where his relationship to painting could be” (N. Spector, op. cit., pp. 42-45 ). Prince recalls of the era that “artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money” (R. Prince, quoted in ibid., p. 37). In contradiction to the prevailing atmosphere, Prince undertook a modest, mundane subject with his Joke series, simultaneously critiquing and overturning the dominance of Minimalist and Neo-Expressionist painting.
Channeling the reductive aesthetic of Ellsworth Kelly or Brice Marden, The Wrong Joke adopts an antiheroic mentality observed throughout Prince’s practice. The work explores the darker side of existence by employing a sardonic form of humor until then unknown in the resolute, elaborate, and precipitous seriousness of the art world in the 1980s. “No one that I know had ever painted a joke in the art world” Richard Prince describes. “It was a very radical subject matter. And if you didn’t like the joke, maybe you liked the painting. And if you didn’t like the painting, maybe you liked the joke” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince,” op. cit., p. 236).
Richard Prince’s The Wrong Joke is an important early example of his Joke Paintings, the series that heralded the artist’s first reckoning with critical and popular success. Appropriating the Minimalist painting style then current in the 1980s, Prince painted found jokes revolving around the popular traveling salesman motif favored by Borscht Belt comics. The Joke Paintings mark a radical point of departure for both Prince and American contemporary art writ large. Renouncing both the Minimalist legacy as well as the bombastic scale of the contemporaneous Neo-Expressionist painters, Prince achieved what Nancy Spector terms an “antimasterpiece,” skillfully inverting the art world’s essential value system (N. Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince: Spiritual America, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2007, p. 39). As the artist himself later recollected, “I mean, can you imagine in 1986, when I made my first Joke painting, nobody had ever [painted a joke]—I mean jokes were something that you heard... What I did was I changed the hearing of a generic Borscht Belt joke, jokes that I grew up with... and I painted them. I painted jokes, and I believe the Jokes are right up there with Rothko” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince” in Donald Graham V. Richard Prince, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, p. 235).
In The Wrong Joke, Prince silkscreens his red joke in six uniform lines at an intimate scale in the direct center of the blue-painted canvas. The discordant scale between text and support forces the viewer into close proximity with the painting in order for the work to be made legible. Prince first began experimenting with the joke format in 1984, when he started writing one-liners on paper with pen, selling them for $10 each. He explored copying cartoons with caption and image intact, as well as swapping images and texts, before finally landing on his monochrome painted format. This diametric change in practice away from the photographic method of the previous decade was critical to his formation as an artist, introducing a greater sense of the personal as well as a greater sense of the artist’s hand into his works, which had previously felt devoid of a creative presence. As Prince noted, “I’m not associated with the hand... beginning the jokes was like starting over” (R. Prince, quoted in L. Philips, “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 41).
The joke itself, culled from the thousands which Prince recorded for decades in a mental repertoire, is itself a metajoke, relying on the audience’s familiarity with archetypal traveling salesman jokes for its unexpected punchline, which operates on a surprising shift in gender dynamics. The salesman ends the line addressing not the farmer but the viewer, breaking the fourth wall with his announcement: “I’m in the wrong joke.” This ‘wrong joke’ appears to be among Prince’s favorite out of the dozens he has appropriated over his career. The joke appears in numerous other works, including several other monochromes, drawings, and The Salesman and the Farmer (1989, private collection). In December of 1987, the year the present work was made, Prince published the article “The Traveling Salesman” in Artforum, where he printed both the text of the present joke as well as a close variant. Discussing the importance of comedy in Prince’s work, Glenn O’Brien states: “Richard Prince is an artist who understands the essential connection between the hysterical and the sublime. He digs the depth of the joke. He knows it’s not only okay to be funny, it’s mandatory” (G. O’Brien, “The Joke of the New,” in Richard Prince, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, op. cit., p. 117). With the joke in The Wrong Joke, Prince leverages the subversion of his audience’s expectations, in tandem with his choice of an almost comical font size for his text, to expertly reach the intersection of the hysterical and the sublime.
1987 proved Prince’s pivotal year. In March, he was featured on the cover of Art in America, garnering the attention of Barbara Gladstone, who began representing him soon thereafter. This rapid rise allowed him to shift his attention to painting for the first time. “His interest in making paintings grew, and when he did exhibit paintings they were large, monochromatic canvases, with single jokes silkscreened in different colors in the center—as minimal, mechanical and blunt as the early rephotograph had been. They seemed to be a joke on painting... Prince was beginning to test where his relationship to painting could be” (N. Spector, op. cit., pp. 42-45 ). Prince recalls of the era that “artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money” (R. Prince, quoted in ibid., p. 37). In contradiction to the prevailing atmosphere, Prince undertook a modest, mundane subject with his Joke series, simultaneously critiquing and overturning the dominance of Minimalist and Neo-Expressionist painting.
Channeling the reductive aesthetic of Ellsworth Kelly or Brice Marden, The Wrong Joke adopts an antiheroic mentality observed throughout Prince’s practice. The work explores the darker side of existence by employing a sardonic form of humor until then unknown in the resolute, elaborate, and precipitous seriousness of the art world in the 1980s. “No one that I know had ever painted a joke in the art world” Richard Prince describes. “It was a very radical subject matter. And if you didn’t like the joke, maybe you liked the painting. And if you didn’t like the painting, maybe you liked the joke” (R. Prince, quoted in “Deposition of Richard Prince,” op. cit., p. 236).