S otheby’s is pleased to present Punchlines: 18 Jokes by Richard Prince, which brings together the artist’s witty and provocative typed-out gags. Hailing from the 1980s and 90s, the present studies for Prince’s deadpan jokes feature his personal notes scrawled in pencil and ink, with spelling errors, crossed out lines, and scribbles intact. As celebrated in this online-only auction, Richard Prince dares his viewers to take a lewd one-liner for a work of fine art. Together, these eighteen jokes exist as seminal studies for some of Prince's most celebrated and iconic joke paintings.
“When Prince hijacks photographs and off-color jokes from their circulation in mass culture and re-presents them as his own, he injects his copies [in the artist’s words] ‘with the element of imagination and thus destablize[s]’ our sense of reality. He takes what we already know–commercial advertising, snapshots of girlfriends, one-liners, celebrity head-shots, pulp-fiction covers–and gives it back relatively unaltered, but forever changed. Prince refocuses on the ordinary; he gives it to us repeatedly, in serial form, until it becomes…extraordinary.”
