Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access - With Distinction

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Contemporary Art

First Advisor

Morgan Falconer

Second Advisor

Agnes Berecz

Abstract

This thesis examines the oeuvre of Richard Prince’s as a sustained allegory of contemporary American visual culture, beginning with his Cowboys series as the point of origin from which his later appropriations, including Girlfriends, Spiritual America, and New Portraits, unfold. Through the recursive gesture of appropriation, Prince’s Cowboys expose the myth of rugged independence as a corporate fiction, revealing how the frontier ethos was redeployed under the Reagan presidency to naturalize neoliberal ideology. Building on this premise, the thesis traces how such logic extends throughout Prince’s subsequent body of work, as his Girlfriends refigure the cowboy’s masculine autonomy as the feminine spectacle of sexual availability, Spiritual America exposes innocence as a commodified ideal at the heart of Reaganera moralism, and the New Portraits translate these mythologies into the digital economy of the twenty-first century.  Ultimately, the thesis argues that Prince’s body of work constitutes not only a critique of American visual culture, but also its most lucid embodiment, as it inhabits the contradictions it exposes between originality and reproduction, freedom and conformity, and critique and complicity, revealing that the American Dream itself takes shape as an image sustained by its own illusion of reality. Prince thus emerges as the quintessential postmodern American artist, not because he resolves the myths of national identity, but because he renders visible the neoliberal systems that perpetuate them, revealing both the ways in which images define a nation, and how the nation, in turn, identifies itself through images.

Distinction

1

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