Richard Prince’s Last Stand

It was a Saturday in July, perfect weather in Sagaponack, and Richard Prince walked to the door of his beach house wearing a shirt with one of his hippie drawings. He had on beat-up khakis and sneakers without socks. There was golf on the TV, paintings of flowers and birds and seashells on the walls.

Prince has been out East for a while. He got property in this secluded spot in the ’90s, when he followed his friend Glenn O’Brien to the houses near potato fields. It was pretty empty then, and collectors Don and Mera Rubell had a place nearby, so they would all get lunch. Later, Prince spent summers here with his family. Boogie boards and a surfboard his kids used growing up were leaning on the deck, filthy. They didn’t get to use them much anyway.

“The breaks off Wainscott Beach aren’t shit,” Prince said.

He wanted to bring me to the guesthouse he converted to a studio. I was excited. I’d be maybe the third person to see his first completely new series of work since 2018. It has a great name, like all his best series: Girlfriends, Hoods, Nurses, Cowboys, Jokes. These new works are called Folk Songs.

As he enters his late 70s, Prince is now the greatest living artist depicting the good, the bad, and the ugly of cultural Americana. Not quite half a century ago, he shocked the art world with brazen acts of appropriation: rephotographing the cowboys in Marlboro cigarette ads and blowing the results up into his own art, modifying the source material. Those works now sell for more than $3 million at auction, making them among the most expensive photographs in history. His paintings sell for more. In 2021 Prince’s Runaway Nurse, a painting over an inkjet print of a pulp novel on canvas, sold for more than $12 million.

As he’s gotten older he’s built out the Prince business as a Gesamtkunstwerk. There’s the art, a books collection that’s an artwork in and of itself, the operational body shop churning out trucks, the merch, the weed vape pens, and what’s perhaps his grand opus: a town-size series of buildings as sculptures in a remote part of the Catskills. After a career of constantly breaking the rules—and, in the mind of some, the law—Prince’s omnivorous eye has become a gold standard for American art.

“He’s a genius, there’s no doubt about it,” said Larry Gagosian, the world’s most prominent art dealer, who’s featured Prince solo shows at his global network of galleries 23 times in 20 years. “He’s one of the great artists of his generation and maybe the defining cultural artist. I mean, you have to think of an artist like Warhol—that’s pretty good company.”

Over and over, Prince has transformed. After painting jokes on monochromatic canvases, he painted car hoods. He meddled in the legacy of de Kooning, Kline, and Pollock. After his scandalous Instagram portraits, he made High Times, large-scale colorful paintings celebrating the 1960s.

Prince is not that easy to get hold of. Before we chatted he hadn’t given an extended interview in more than a decade. He isn’t planning on giving any more after this one. He’s had a health scare. Since 2020 he’s been mostly at his Hamptons home, doing work in isolation. He isn’t a recluse on the level of, say, J.D. Salinger, whose work Prince has appropriated in the past. Prince still has a place in the city, two connected town houses perched on a desirable East Side block dotted with blue-chip galleries. Edward Hopper’s Chair Car hangs over the fireplace in his kitchen. Downstairs is a maybe Pollock with a disputed provenance. There’s a piece from Warhol’s little-known Retrospective series that shows the Pope of Pop in a rare contemplative mode, mashing up his most famous series. (Prince and Warhol share a birthday 21 years apart.) The town houses also have part of his rare books collection, which the book dealer Matt Shuster has called the finest of its kind in the United States.

“Richard Prince’s book collection might be his best work,” Shuster said. “It’s not just source material—it’s his worldview, a private club with one member.”

And he has a few hundred acres upstate, where he’s installed vast sculptural works, storage facilities, hangar-size gallery spaces, and a house shingled with vinyl records and a disco ball once owned by James Brown inside.

The Hamptons is a good place to play art-world bingo. I had a full dance card that evening. I told Prince that Joe Bradley and Valentina Akerman were holding a dinner at their Amagansett art space, Galerie Sardine, for new work by Nate Lowman. Prince was intrigued. He’s collected Bradley’s work, and Lowman’s. When I later told Lowman and Bradley that Prince said hello, they were slightly agog. You saw him…in person? No one had in a while.

Apart from shooting 18 holes at The Bridge, one of the world’s most expensive golf clubs, he’s been mostly up in his studio, working like mad, with no assistants, just painting away.

“Listen, Richard barely noticed COVID,” said Bob Rubin, who founded The Bridge in 2002. “I mean, it had the least impact on him. He kind of keeps to himself anyway.”

Prince has been playing golf since he chased down balls at the Hyannisport Club in the ’60s—as a malcontent teenager, he was keeping grounds right next to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis.

There was a rumor that even among those willing to spend $1.5 million to join The Bridge, Prince won the club championship one year.

“He won the senior club championship. Let’s not get carried away,” Rubin said.

A selection of Prince’s new work will be shown at Gagosian in November. Even for Prince, who’s made a career of departures, it’s a departure. It explores mortality, the unknown, and folk art.

“This idea of making things but not necessarily calling them art, I do that a lot,” he told me. “And sometimes what I make remains just the making of it, but sometimes what I make does turn into art.”

The series began with the gigantic rubber blasting mats he found upstate and installed on his property as just that, not art, just the making of it. One night he heard the wind going through the rubber and it made a squeak, a song through the folk art. A folk song. He started making new paintings. He brought in garish motifs, bloody mouths with appropriated cigarettes inkjet printed onto them, the trail of smoke making an ab-ex whorl Hula-Hooping through the canvas. Then there’s the surfers, the figures hanging ten, also inkjet printed with the ripple of wake painted behind the figures. Some of these paintings are massive.

“A lot of this work has been in the racks for a couple of years before the train got in,” he said.

He went off on the train thing and how it relates to the history of the folk movement, something he was on the ground floor of in the ’60s.

“I’m not sure when I thought about the train or looked at the train, but I remember the train being part of the Dust Bowl, Woody Guthrie, the hobo—there were a bunch of trains. On the Cisco Houston album there’s a train. And whatever is inherent in that name, whatever the name suggests, Folk Songs, whether it suggests acoustic guitars or protest, that’s part of it for me.”

I wondered who else has seen this indelibly Princean but radically different new work that will also no doubt make people quite angry.

“I’ve shown this to maybe three or four people so far, really,” he said. “I’ve shown the Folk Songs to one other artist. And I did show it to Larry.”

When asked about the perhaps unexpectedly dark nature of the new works, Gagosian said, “I can’t wait for the show. I think people are going to really be fascinated by this work, and puzzled by it, and enthralled, and all those things. I can’t wait to see it on the wall.”

When Prince in 2017 unveiled his previous new series, High Times, it already felt like a coda to a career. In a rave The New York Times praised it as “one of his best.” This coda to the coda will kick off an enormously busy 12 months for any artist, but especially one approaching his late 70s.

“Every time I go to the studio, there’s something new, and Richard is always making work daily,” said Nancy Spector, who put together the Prince retrospective, Spiritual America, that took over the entirety of the Guggenheim in 2007. “There’s no way that he can’t make work. So there’s so many series, some of which have probably never been seen by the public.”

In May, Prince will be part of a two-person show with Arthur Jafa, curated by Spector, that will take over the Fondazione Prada in Venice. (Jafa, a fellow appropriation artist, once said, “Richard Prince is clearly the blackest white artist out here.”) Later next year he’ll take over Museo Jumex, the David Chipperfield–designed private museum founded by art-collecting fruit-juice billionaire Eugenio López Alonso. His show at Max Hetzler’s remote West Texas space in Marfa features works from Prince’s Posters series until December.

This past summer a new work by Prince was installed in a thousand-year-old church in Rome, put down right where the altar used to be. It is the first Prince work in the medium of film. It is nearly seven hours long. The artist himself is onscreen the entire time. The film is appropriated footage of the artist giving a deposition after being sued for allegedly appropriating commercial photography in his art. He calls it Deposition.

“He’s an anarchist,” said Gavin Brown, the dealer who staged the show at his Sant’Andrea de Scaphis space in Rome’s Trastevere district and who is a partner at Gladstone, the gallery founded by Barbara Gladstone, one of Prince’s early devotees. Brown’s enthusiasm for art is legendary, but I’ve never seen him quite this animated by love for a single artwork. He thinks Deposition is one of the great artworks of our era and one that, in its conceptual rigor and imposing length, is something of a key to the entire Prince ecosystem.

“It’s the first time where you feel Richard Prince is wearing his heart on his sleeve,” Brown said. “But then you wonder, is it his sleeve or just a photograph of somebody else’s sleeve?”

For years Prince has been publishing essays, first as zines, then books, then in what he called his “birdtalk,” and eventually he just started putting everything on Twitter. (The account still exists, but it’s mostly retweets of anti-Trump talking heads.) Lots of material about his life, some of it real, some of it fake, some of it true, some of it lies. Prince-heads are wont to remind you: There was a Robert Zimmerman and there was a Bob Dylan. Prince shares Dylan’s penchant for weaving in the real and the artifice. In the Prince ecosystem there are noms de ars and noms de plume, genders blurred in social media handles, matryoshka dolls of LLCs within companies that sometimes have legit business storefronts.

Here’s a primer. Prince was born, he has said, in the Panama Canal Zone, to parents in the proto-CIA. He sent me his passport. It looks real. His parents were apparently OSS agents. A source close to him said he recently took a trip back to Panama to revisit his roots and keeps a picture of a cobblestone street in the Old Gorgona district of the Canal Zone on a shelf of his cherished objects in his upstate studio. His family moved outside of Boston when he was young, and his Masshole accent is still remarkably intact—“idea” is “idear” and so on. He grew his hair long. He spent time in California—missed Monterey Pop but saw the Doors at the Whiskey.

“I met someone on the street on Sunset, went up to a party in Laurel Canyon that evening, and then did some hits,” as he put it.

He went back to Boston, fought with his parents, skated through school, hitchhiked to Woodstock but left before Jimi Hendrix played, smoked a lot of dope, and developed a healthy skepticism toward the establishment.

He always had a gift for draftsmanship. After enrolling at a third-rate liberal arts school in Maine, he befriended the art teacher, who took him under his wing. He taught pottery to middle school students in Massachusetts. While house-sitting, he read a magazine article about artists in SoHo, so he moved to New York, lived in a shithole at Prince and West Broadway, and took drawing classes at Broome and Mercer. The next year he got a job at the Time-Life Building, collating pages from the magazines, and in 1976 staged a guerrilla show in the basement, where he placed four magazine covers on four sides of the table. Time. Cosmopolitan. Photo. People.

“I think Richard is really the real deal,” says Jeff Koons. “We’re alive, we’re functioning. I think our love of art—and our commitment to art—is very similar.”

No one saw the work, but he documented the installation with photography. This got him to the idea of the original copy. A photograph of the magazine would be the object. The camera was an electric scissor, an eight-track recording tape, a beat maker. In 1977 he took pictures of furniture company advertisements from The New York Times magazine and created the artwork Untitled (Living Rooms).

To Prince, depicting something that already exists is as close as you can get to true art, because it’s real. So he started taking pictures of cowboys in cigarette ads.

“I’ve always liked the idea of taking as much subjectivity out of the image—or interpretation, which is what usually is associated with art,” he told me. “What I’d like to do is take that out so that I don’t have to have it. Someone doesn’t even have to really weigh in. You sort of remove the umpire, the critic, the opinion. There is none of that.”

This continued for years, as he expanded his vision of appropriation. Metro Pictures opened in 1980, and he showed there and at the East Village gallery International With Monument along with other artists who came to be associated with the Pictures Generation: Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, and Sarah Charlesworth.

After bumming around the West Side, Prince moved to the East Village.

“I lived in the same building with Allen Ginsberg. I just didn’t want to bother…. I should have. I wish I had. He lived five floors above me or whatever. ‘Hey Allen, can you come in and sign one of your poetry…’ I just don’t have that, whatever that is.”

He did meet fellow East Village resident Jeff Koons. They hit it off and drank beer and talked to girls at a no-frills joint called Red Bar at Seventh Street and First Avenue. They were both working on radical ideas. In the years that followed, Koons would start his lifelong transubstantiation of the humble inflatable toy rabbit into what would become a $91 million über-Duchampian icon. No one would show him. Koons is now the most expensive living artist. Prince got the work immediately.

“Jeff Koons was the first artist that I met that when I saw his work I thought…this guy’s making art like I wanted it to be made,” Prince once wrote.

“We probably would hit almost every bar and just have a beer—any bar below 14th Street, at some point, we probably visited at one time or another,” Koons said when I spoke to him in September. “I think everybody enjoyed beer, and we enjoyed sitting around and talking about art.”

Koons, who then was working a day job at the membership desk at MoMA, saved his museum wages to buy two essential early Prince works: Single Man Looking to the Right and Golden Acorns.

“I think Richard is really the real deal, and we are of the same kind of a generation,” Koons said. “We’re alive, we’re functioning. I think our love of art—and our commitment to art—is very similar.”

Prince didn’t get the press lauded upon the likes of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Ross Bleckner. But things were happening. Untitled (Woman With Compact) was on the cover of Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture, the defining art treatise of the era. Steven Meisel staged a photo shoot on Prince’s bed for a young singer named Madonna. He rented a room to the actor who played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. He hung out with Dike Blair at the Mudd Club. He started making the Cowboys. Nobody bought them. In 1983 he rephotographed an image by Gary Gross of a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields and turned it into an appropriation work he called Spiritual America. (In 2005, Shields, a noted arts philanthropist, collaborated with Prince on an updated version of the work by posing, this time clothed, in front of a motorcycle.) Metro Pictures declined to show it, so he opened his own gallery, called Spiritual America, at 5 Rivington Street.

Prince was essentially cast out from the art world, so he moved to California and made rephotographs of ads with red and orange that looked vaguely like the end of the world. He called them Sunsets. It wasn’t about the money. He never knew any sold until he saw one while watching Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture. Her parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, had one on the wall of their Desbrosses Street loft.

It turns out, Carroll Dunham saw the Sunset work up at Metro Pictures and had to have it—and spent what was a lot of money to him at the time to get it.

“When I saw them all together, I loved them and thought they were a big development in his work,” he told me. “I had a job then and a steady paycheck—I really wanted to get one so I did. Never regretted that, although it felt like a stretch at the time.”

“It was hanging in our loft on Broadway in SoHo forever,” Simmons said, chiming in on the group chat. “The kids grew up with it.”

“Yes,” Dunham said. “Still a cherished possession.”

He moved back to the city and into the back space at 303 Gallery, which was run by the art dealer—and later his wife—Lisa Spellman. In 1987 he got a loft on Reade Street. For a few years he had been making these strange works on paper, just handwritten jokes on a specific thick card stock: “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.” “I went to see a psychiatrist. He said ‘tell me everything,’ I did, and now he’s doing my act.” In the loft he found he could paint the text against a monochromatic background. People started taking the jokes seriously, and thus began his first-ever period of any kind of commercial success. By 1992, he was firmly in Barbara Gladstone’s stable. She was selling his work for more than $160,000 in today’s cash. That year he had a survey at the Whitney and a dozen works in the epoch-defining Documenta show in Kassel, Germany.

Smash commercial success really came a decade later, when Prince began a new series he dubbed Nurses. Working with the Hamptons-based rare book dealer John McWhinnie, Prince started buying pulp-fiction paperbacks featuring women in various guises—buying them at used bookstores, pulp purveyors, flea markets. He inkjet printed them onto canvas and then painted over them.

The Nurses were an immediate hit and started getting flipped for insanely high prices. A few years after the first were shown at a gallery, Overseas Nurse sold for more than $8 million at Sotheby’s. The record for a Nurse stands at more than $12 million—putting Prince in a very small club of living artists with work that has sold for eight figures: among them Koons, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig, his old East Village pal Christopher Wool, and Damien Hirst, an artist Prince collects in depth.

That should have been Prince’s ultimate crossover moment. The Nurses brought collaborations with Marc Jacobs and photo shoots with Kate Moss. But a decade later, he got into social media through his kids. He watched how his daughter got absolutely addicted to a photo sharing app called Instagram. Back in the day, Prince would do this thing where he commissioned portraits by asking folks for three pictures of themselves that they liked. He chose one to rephotograph, and that was the artwork. He found the feed of the model Jessica Hart and liked a photo of Hart in big fur boots standing in front of a picture of Brigitte Bardot.

“I told her, someone should make a portrait out [of] this photo,” Prince wrote in 2014. “She said, ‘Why don’t you?’ ”

“The Instagram portraits are really what I call my hit record—and I never had a hit record,” he told me in the studio in July. “You just can’t make that up, and you certainly can’t control it. I wasn’t prepared for the reaction.”

The series was called, with neo-Koonsian banality, New Portraits. It came out of the Instagram paper printouts sold through the gallery Karma in Amagansett in the summer of 2013 for $12 a pop. By early 2014, he was ready to treat them as artworks, in a white cube. And on September 19, a new body of work arrived sans fanfare in a gallery behind Gagosian’s bookstore on the ground floor of 980 Madison, almost hidden. There was no press release. The inkjet-on-canvas works were priced at $40,000 each.

“I liked them immediately. I thought, What a clever idea. These are going to sell like crazy,” Gagosian said to me.

Prince later testified that he made $45 million purely from sales of his art in 2014, and at least that amount in 2015. “Maybe a little bit more than $45 million,” he said.

The critical response was torrential, every writer feeling the need to weigh in, most of it scathing. Peter Schjeldahl said the show made him wish he were dead, and that counted as a favorable review. Artnet ran this as a headline: “Richard Prince Sucks.” Jerry Saltz got Prince’s bit right off the bat, but his love for the work just reignited the discourse, forcing other critics to respond to him. Eventually, the model Emily Ratajkowski got in on the dialogue with an essay titled “Buying Myself Back,” a saga of how Prince came to make an Instagram portrait of her that ended up above the couch of an unnamed art boy, forcing her to negotiate to get control of her own image.

“He doesn’t give a fuck on one level—and on another, he deeply cares about ethics, democracy, freedom of speech, all of the core values,” says Nancy Spector.

It’s a searing attack on the ex who tried to keep the work, but at the same time Ratajkowski had a much more generous take on Prince’s Instagram works than the art critics were willing to say publicly: “I’d studied art at UCLA and could appreciate Prince’s Warholian take on Instagram,” she wrote.

She was also game to be a part of the whole stunt.

“Prince’s comment on that post, included among several others at the bottom of the painting, alludes to an imagined day he has spent with me on the beach: ‘U told me the truth. U lost the [anchor emoji]. No hurt. No upset. All energy bunny now that it’s sunny,’ it reads,” Ratajkowski wrote. “I liked the comment he left on this one far better than his comment on the black-and-white study, where he asks, ‘Were you built in a science lab by teenage boys?’ ”

At some point, Prince made an Instagram portrait of Ivanka Trump, who before the 2016 election was a redoubtable collector on the scene, always at openings, willing to take chances on emerging artists and install their works in a building owned by her husband, Jared Kushner.

Together, Javanka had in the years before the election built an estimated $25 million art collection with all the trendy stuff at the time: Alex Da Corte, Alex Israel, Nate Lowman, Dan Colen. After she got wind of Prince’s Instagram portraits, Trump reached out to the artist via an art adviser and asked if he would be willing to make an Instagram portrait for her. He looked through her feed, found something that interested him, and whipped up the work.

Then her father got elected president, the artists revolted, and protests were held outside of Kushner’s Puck Building, where the couple hung work from their collection in the lobby.

Da Corte told Trump to get his work off her wall, but Prince went one step further. He disowned his artwork.

“When it turned out that he wasn’t going to be the closet Democrat that everybody thought he might’ve been, yeah, I just said something to the effect of ‘That’s not mine. That’s not my portrait. That’s not.’ I can’t remember the words that I said, but that got a pretty interesting reaction,” Prince said.

It was a pretty radical turn. For centuries patrons who support right-wing causes have been at odds with the artists whose work they collect. For the most part, everyone’s gotten along. Just buying an artwork is a big enough gesture for most people in the industry. And to that end, one Prince obsessive said disowning a work, even if it was owned by President Trump’s daughter, was a bridge too far. If Prince can say that this person’s work is fake, it’s a house of cards, and suddenly all artwork owned by those who the artist disagrees with becomes fake.

Prince, in hindsight, sees some logic in this.

Prince’s work is, at its foundation, honest about the dark underbelly of America in a way that has particular resonance in the second Trump era.

“The problem with that type of protest is that then you’re in so many collections,” he told me. “Firstly, you don’t know who owns your work, number one. And then your work is owned by people who are part of that landscape. And you could spend the entire day trying to deal with that situation.”

When it comes to addressing politics, Prince thinks his friends Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger “do it better and do it more consistently.” But in so many indirect ways, how he responds to the systems that govern America, he is a deeply political artist, one particularly well-suited for this moment of deep cynicism.

“He doesn’t give a fuck on one level—and on another, he deeply cares about ethics, democracy, freedom of speech, all of the core values that we like to think are still somewhere buried in this country right now,” said Spector. “Richard identifies with the hippie drawings. He identifies with 1968 counterculture, anti-war. I mean, that really was part of his intellectual formation. So I think that willingness to buck the system is very, very true to the work.”

Or, as Prince put it to me, “I eat politics, I sleep politics, but I don’t drink politics. My experience has always been: Paint the protest.”

Prince’s work is, at its foundation, honest about the dark underbelly of America in a way that has particular resonance in the second Trump era—especially as the president orders a public institution like the Smithsonian to disengage from “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” When I asked Spector about staging the Prince-Jafa show at a private institution in Italy next year, she said, “I don’t think I could make this exhibition in the United States right now.”

The Trump stuff was nothing compared to the fusillade of lawsuits. As soon as his name got printed next to seven-figure prices, the photographers who took pictures that Prince allegedly appropriated started coming for a paycheck.

(Prince via his deposition: “Commercial photographers are assigned, they are told what to do, and literally after they take their images, their images are art- directed. Meaning they are changed…they are airbrushed, they are cropped, they are edited, and they usually wind up looking very little like what the commercial photographer first took.”)

Patrick Cariou filed a copyright infringement suit in 2009 over images he took of Rastafarians used in Prince’s 2008 series Canal Zone. (Prince on why he wanted to make art of Rastafarians: “I always wanted dreads, but I knew I couldn’t grow them. But if I couldn’t grow them, I could paint them.”) Donald Graham sued Prince and Gagosian Gallery for making an Instagram portrait of Graham’s portrait of a Rastafarian. Eric McNatt sued Prince and Blum & Poe for using another image in his New Portraits.

The process dragged in his gallerists, who spent top dollar for lawyers to defend the artistic process of one of the country’s best artists. There was setback after setback, and the occasional victory—in 2013, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that most of the work in the Canal Zone series constituted fair use, a huge victory for appropriation art.

“At the time I thought, ‘What a fucking pain in the ass. I’m getting sued.’ But I’m so proud to have been part of it,” said Gagosian. “It was like, ‘Who wants to sit through depositions and pay lawyers?’ It went on and on and on. But at the end of the day, I’m really proud that I supported Richard. It’s not like I’m a hero. I was just doing the right thing.”

Watching Prince calmly talk his way through his career while the attorneys bark increasingly absurd lines of attack at him—it’s strangely engrossing, and at times uproariously funny.

They settled with Cariou in 2014 over the remaining Canal Zone works, and last year, Prince agreed to pay Graham and McNatt damages to end those lawsuits. But he also has found a way to incorporate the process into his practice. Even with his prodigious output, he’d never made a film work. He’s always admired Warhol’s Empire, an eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building.

On a Friday morning in March 2018, Prince entered the offices of the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore in midtown Manhattan and prepared to be deposed in the cases Graham and McNatt had brought. He sat in front of a camera in a black suit jacket and white button-down shirt, a blue background behind him and a bottle of Poland Spring water at arm’s length. As things got started, a chorus of attorneys chirped in the background, never seen on the screen. For the next six hours and 40 minutes, Prince talked. Prince was being sued by two commercial photographers, and like many depositions, it was recorded on video.

And while I was speaking to Prince in the Hamptons, 4,000 miles away in Rome, it was evening and the artwork Deposition was playing on a TV set at a gallery in an abandoned church.

“Was it performative? I mean, that, I really can’t say. But I did have in mind the fact that at the end of all this, it might be a way of making a movie,” he told me. “And I always had thought, You know, I know artists have made movies. Lots of artists have made movies in the past. But again, I never had a subject.”

Watching Prince calmly talk his way through his career while the attorneys bark increasingly absurd lines of attack at him is strangely engrossing and at times uproariously funny. But at a certain point, the dialogue crosses the Rubicon from surreal and enters into a truly transcendent moment of contemporary art. Just after the five-hour mark, the lawyers slide across the table, as evidence, an image that Prince had posted to his Twitter account a few days before. Exhibit 187 is a picture of a shoehorn. Prince found it on the ground outside the Met and decided it was art. His art.

“I realized then they had been trolling me, because I had put this image out a couple of days before the deposition,” he said, and by “put out” he meant tweeted. “And when that thing came across the table…. I think if you watch enough Law & Order, you’re told you don’t ask a question unless you know the answer. Well, when they slipped that, they didn’t know what the answer was going to be.”

Prince told me that this, among all other moments, is when he knew that the deposition could be an artwork.

“Do you recognize exhibit 187?” a lawyer off-screen asks Prince.

“Yes,” Prince says.

“What is exhibit 187?” the lawyer asks.

“A good question,” Prince says. “It’s everything.”

“And what do you mean by that?” says the lawyer.

“It’s my entire life,” Prince says.

“What is the photo in exhibit 187 of?” says the lawyer.

“It’s art history. It’s an African mask, it’s Cubism, it’s a little bit of Calder, it’s Duchamp, it’s definitely Man Ray, it’s a found object, it’s a ready-made, it’s a nod, reminds me of a Hans Bellmer. And in a more contemporary sense—and this is someone who really, a very good friend of mine who’s actually having an exhibit at the moment—Robert Gober. So, in a strange way, what you’re looking at is about 118 years of art history here.”

He goes on, no one stopping him.

“I mean, this is an image that is actually too good to be true, hard to believe, almost impossible, really real, almost real, it’s so real that it’s not real, and yet in the end, this is what appropriation is about,” he says. “It’s basically a shoehorn. But is it a shoehorn? It’s not. It’s not because I say it’s not. It’s not a shoehorn because I just explained what it really is.

“I was actually thinking about bringing it here today to explain what appropriation is,” he finishes.

After this, Charles Munn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, breaks in unexpectedly, at which point the camera cuts out. I asked Prince what happened during that gap in filming.

“It was kind of a 15-minute rap about the history of art, and I just remember the lawyer standing up, and started yelling to my lawyer, ‘Can you please tell your client to stop?’ ” Prince said. “And of course, I just kept looking at the video. At that moment it became a little performance.”

There are many moments like that throughout Deposition. There’s a digression on whether Andy Kaufman’s stand-up act was considered performance art. There’s a long talk about whether taking a screenshot on an iPhone is an act of creative expression. There’s a long narrative about how the Guggenheim purchased a hunting lodge studded with in situ works from Prince ahead of his retrospective, only to have a lightning strike destroy the house two months before the show opened. Prince bought it back from the Guggenheim.

At one point, they press him on whether or not he is an investor in an East Hampton Tex-Mex tequila joint with Ron Perlman. “I hope not,” he says. The lawyers finally break character and lose it. “I believe, unfortunately, I have a very small stake in a restaurant, I believe it’s called the Blue Parrot,” he says, audibly pained by this knowledge. Deposition is one of the funniest pieces of video art this century, all deadpan, no punch lines, and this might be the only time someone actually laughs during the proceedings. A real joke.

But above all it is, like Empire, an art film depicting a single thing for an extended duration, with a camera that stays still, allowing the object onscreen to become a solitary hero: a gunslinger at the saloon gates, a holy man preaching from an altar, an artist at an easel, a citizen before the authorities.

“I mean, all the heretics have been brought before the court, haven’t they? It is such an ancient structure,” Gavin Brown said.

About halfway through a tour of Prince’s secret, off-the-grid, very remote town-size compound of studios in the Catskills, flanked by Prince’s studio manager, Matthew Gaughan, and two assistants, with the sun setting over the mountains, I realized this was one of the great cultural experiences of my life. I was lucky. Very few people have seen Prince’s art fiefdom in Rensselaerville.

“It’s kind of Marfa: Upstate, and it’s, to me, as relevant as Marfa,” Gagosian told me.

“It’s kind of like…” and here the great dealer pauses for effect “…Richardville.”

He first came up here on a fishing trip with the artist Peter Nadin. They got lost and ended up in Rensselaerville, a colonial-era one-streeter.

And his compound is outside of town, pretty much impossible to find without the precise instructions I was given. I drove through on a recent Friday with my dog. Suddenly, I was hauling ass up a big dirt road that led to a plateau overlooking the high Catskills. On the right was a long row of warehouses. It was like passing into another dimension.

“There’s no through road—there’re five roads that lead in, it’s almost like a dead end,” Prince told me, maintaining the mystery. “It’s not built like a traditional town, where there’s one entrance, you go in and then you go out. Geographically, it’s an interesting spot, very close to town, but yet it’s still in the middle of nowhere.”

If Prince’s oeuvre is the secret history of America as seen through the radical politics of its counterculture, this was the skeleton key. There’s a dozen buildings, each sprawling, and you zip around on golf carts, passing sculptures by Frank Stella and Urs Fischer. There’s a decaying tree house in a gigantic rotten tree next to the original ranch abode. There’s an operational body shop full of cars mid-chop, where Prince gets the hoods that he paints, but also a monster truck that’s been vinyl wrapped with pinups in the truck bed. There are full-size galleries installed with his own work and full-size galleries installed with his art collection. There are multiple Jean Prouvé structures: one inside a warehouse housing Prince’s collection (David Hammons, Nadin, Bradley) and a Prouvé gas station housing new sculptures: upside-down outboard tugboat motors. It looks like an alien invasion.

There’s a room with some of the best Cowboys—including a sculpture of a boy dressed in Western garb on a wooden plinth with gunshot shrapnel courtesy of Prince. It’s actually not wood—Prince made the sculpture, put it on a wooden plinth, shot the shit out of it with a shotgun, then cast it all in bronze. As we walked around we played the “Is it bronze?” game. Those sure look like wooden planks or rubber tire planters—nope, it’s cast bronze. When McWhinnie, his beloved book dealer, died in a tragic snorkeling accident in the British Virgin Islands, Prince walked to his desk in a daze and found his Rolodex opened to McWhinnie’s card—so he cast the Rolodex in bronze, just like that. That rotten tree with the tree house has to come down soon. Prince is going to cast it in bronze and reinstall it. It’ll be his largest artwork ever.

There’s a library with archives, including the first handwritten jokes, which Prince made on index cards and installed inside cassette tapes as frames. “I’ve been married for thirty-four years and I’m still in love with the same woman. If my wife ever finds out, she’ll kill me.” There’s his CD collection: the classics, along with a few choice newer records by acts such as Bright Eyes, The Decemberists, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kings of Leon, My Chemical Romance, and the soundtrack to There Will Be Blood. The knickknacks include models of cruise ships lined up in a row, a printout of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images with the text under the pipe reading “Ce n’est pas une prince,” the postcard of the cobblestone street in the Panama Canal Zone, pictures of his kids, and a box that read “Jimi Hendrix unit.” Inside was a plaster cast of Hendrix’s penis.

There’s a full-scale clay model of a Ford muscle car surrounded by some of the most classic Cowboys works, all museum level, astounding.

And there’s also a strange sculpture installed amid the best pure view of the Catskill Mountains I’ve ever seen, an iron-wrought gate to nowhere. Given the breadth of his work on display here, one might think it’s a Prince. It’s not. It’s a sculpture by Bob Dylan.

According to Prince, they have some kind of a relationship, as the artist has done studio visits with Dylan the painter and collected a bunch of Dylan grails over the years: the original Milton Glaser drawing for the poster included in early pressings of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Prince owns the original 1962 acetates of songs from Dylan’s first record, bought from producer John Hammond. In Deposition he calls Dylan a mentor and a friend.

“Richard’s always kind of thinking about Bob Dylan,” Gaughan said as we stared at the gate and the rolling hills of the mountain range.

There was even a rumor that Prince was secretly making the artworks that appeared in the singer’s solo show at Gagosian, though everyone denies it and I don’t believe that’s actually the case. Regardless, there’s an obvious kinship between Prince and Zimmerman. They’ve invented in themselves the America they want to see. They printed the legend. I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.

“Dylan has been either in my life or close to it for most of my adult years,” Prince said in “There Goes My Hero,” an essay for the Gagosian book accompanying Dylan’s 2011 show at 980 Madison. (Dylan hadn’t responded to my questions as of press time.)

It was a lot to take in, the enormity of Rensselaerville. And it made me think about what would happen to it in the future, in the decades to come, this incredible secret town—Prince is getting up there in age. Turns out, Prince was willing to talk pretty openly about what might happen after he’s gone. He’s thought about whether Rensselaerville could be a Marfa-like place—though perhaps not, like the original, a bucket-list selfie spot. And yet it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which it’s just hidden away forever.

“That’s something we’ve thought about, and I’m not any closer to making a determination, only because I’ve got family involved, and they need to be part of it, and I don’t know if they want to be part of it,” Prince told me. “And I don’t blame them if they don’t want to be part of it. I know I won’t be part of it, because I’ll be gone, so it’s not going to make any difference.”

I asked him about the Marfa thing. Maybe he’s into that plan—he currently has a show up at Max Hetzler’s sole US space, which happens to be there. He didn’t go for the installation, typically. He doesn’t love the idea of hanging out in dead artists’ studios.

“I’ve never been to Marfa,” he revealed to me. “I have been to [Judd’s] place on Mercer, and I’ve been to the de Kooning house, the Pollock. I found going to the de Kooning house a little weird, to be in someone’s….”

He paused thinking about the homes of his artist heroes being turned into tourist attractions.

“I certainly don’t want that,” he said.

But there is a way forward. He knows that artists have estates. And whatever happens with his work, with his legacy, with Rensselaerville, Richard Prince’s America will outlive Richard Prince the person.

“There’s an opportunity there, but I don’t know how to frame it yet,” he said. “Maybe it could be something that’s different. Maybe something could be invented that could be different.”

Learn more about the Art World according to Nate Freeman:

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