This Is How The Suicide Girls Responded When Art Show Sold Their Instagram Photos For $90,000

Last week, Photographer Richard Prince stirred controversy with an Art Gallery where he sold copyright-free Instagram photos for as much as $90,000. Prince is actually known for taking advantage of public domain works, one time he even published The Catcher in the Rye with his name on the jacket instead of JD Salinger’s.

This week, however, he may have met his match after hosting another gallery, this time featuring mostly photos from The Suicide Girls Instagram account. These photos also sold for up to $90,000, but the Suicide Girls refused to go after him in court and get the government involved, instead they decided to beat him at his own game and undercut him.

One of the models, Doe Deere, began offering prints of the photos that he sold at the art gallery for only $90 a piece, a fraction of their cost at the art gallery.

asalll


This was followed up by a post to the Suicide Girls website founder Selena Mooney, known as Missy Suicide, stating that they would be selling all of the prints from the art show at the discounted rate.

In the post, Missy said that:

If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavour I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art. I was once really annoyed by Forever 21 selling shirts with our slightly altered images on them, but an artist? Richard Prince is an artist and he found the images we and our girls publish on Instagram as representative of something worth commenting on, part of the zeitgeist, I guess? Thanks Richard!’

suid

In a world without intellectual property, this is one of a million different ways that artists can resolve their conflicts.


John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.

This article (This Is How Suicide Girls Responded When Art Show Sold Their Instagram Photos For $90,000) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com.

Popular on True Activist