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Your Instagram pictures might be being sold for a lot of money
Other | Thursday 28th May 2015 | Carl
Richard Prince may be currently selling your Instagram pictures at the Frieze Art Fair... and you would have no idea. The definition of art in today's society is completely changing. In fact, what is considered as an art is undefined. 'Art' is a large concept. The form is free; sculpture, performance, music, sound, video or photography. It can be physical or digital.
A series of photographs or screenshots were presented recently at the Frieze Art Fair. Those screenshots are in fact Instagram photos that have been taken by anonymous people like you and me. This is where the controversy lies. The work of the artist is misunderstood by the people who see those pictures. The man who made this exhibition disputes that a free of rights picture can be used for a lucrative deal for an artist. Richard Prince sold one of those pictures for $100,000 without giving a percentage to the person who took the photo.
The prints that Richard Prince make fall under the fair use rules, which are an ensemble of American laws made to limit copyright piracy. In the end Prince is questioning the sense of digital creativity in our modern societies - is everything saleable?
