This is one of the most destructive works of art in the entire world. Its intersection with Urbit isn't just the usual race, technicality, nationhood, imprisonment, class rats nest of a conjuncture. This photograph is an incursion. It is also a political fiction. In the words of its Maker, "It deals with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way."
I spent Mother's Day, 2022, closing down a bar with the poet Vanessa Place. Vanessa is hot. For as long as I've known her, she's turned language towards the voice. She's also very perverse. For example, she says,
"I had a ten year old boy once"
A couple years prior, I'd invoiced the artist Jon Rafman $666.00 on behalf of Place as an honorarium for her presence on an earned media campaign following Rafman's cancellation. This time, Place is my cancel consultant, so before I can exploit her aesthetic judgement I need to ask her for her legal opinion. She gives it to me.
“The photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be,” Gary Gross told the UK Telegram in 2009. By then, the image in question was no longer his, or, at least, the rights to the image were no longer his; nor would his name be associated with it in anything but a trivial capacity. By then a
In 1987, the Whitney Museum oversaw the purchase of the rights to a single image out of the series by the conceptual artist Richard Prince, who “rephotographed” the original photo shortly after the trial. That year—1987– Shields graduated from Princeton University. Her senior thesis was titled, “The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, Pretty Baby and Lacombe Lucien."