The art of sacred theft: When cindy sherman and richard prince reinvent the gaze

What unfolds in these makeshift studios, between the late 1970s and early 1980s, goes far beyond the realm of contemporary art. It is a war of images, a radical questioning of authenticity, a dizzying exploration of what it means to "see" in the age of mechanical reproduction. The Pictures Generation—this movement of which Sherman and Prince are the leading figures—does not merely produce works: it dissects the very mechanisms of representation, revealing how cinema, advertising, and photography shape our desires, our fears, and even our identity.

01The shattered mirror of America

To understand the urgency of their approach, one must return to the America of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, a country where the dream is cracking. The 1970s end in disenchantment: Vietnam has left its scars, Watergate has shaken trust in institutions, and the oil crisis brutally reminds everyone of the limits of progress. In this context, television becomes both a window and a smokescreen. Images, now ubiquitous, no longer reflect reality—they fabricate it.

It is in this crucible that the Pictures Generation is born, a group of artists who, as critic Douglas Crimp writes, "do not produce images, but expose them." Their playground? Clichés. Their weapon? Appropriation. Their target? The myth of originality. At a time when Warhol has just turned Campbell’s soup into an icon and Duchamp has made a urinal into a work of art, Sherman and Prince push the logic further: what if art were nothing more than a game of distorting mirrors, where each image reflects another, ad infinitum?

02Cindy Sherman: the actress who played every role

Imagine a woman who, for over forty years, has embodied hundreds of characters without ever revealing her true face. Cindy Sherman is not a photographer in the traditional sense: she is a performer who uses the camera as a two-way mirror. Her Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980), a series of 69 black-and-white photographs, have become one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. Yet, at first glance, nothing distinguishes them from the cinema images of the 1950s and 1960s.

Sherman plays, in turn, a heartbroken secretary, a femme fatale with a troubled gaze, a student lost in a big city, a wife waiting for her husband in an empty kitchen. Every pose, every prop, every dramatic lighting is calculated to evoke a specific film genre: film noir, Italian melodrama, romantic comedy. But there is one unsettling detail: these scenes are not taken from any existing film. They are pure invention, fragments of stories that were never shot.

What fascinates in these images is their fundamental ambiguity. Sherman does not merely parody female stereotypes; she embodies them with such conviction that one almost forgets it is a performance. In Untitled #21, she appears in a trench coat, looking over her shoulder with an expression of fear mixed with defiance. The raking light deepens the shadows under her eyes, creating a chiaroscuro effect worthy of a Hitchcock film. Yet this woman does not exist. She is both every cinema heroine and none.

Sherman’s genius lies in her ability to play with the viewer’s expectations. Her images work like traps: they attract the gaze with their familiarity, then unsettle it by revealing their artificiality. In Untitled #14, a woman in a bathrobe smokes a cigarette, her eyes lost in the void. The image immediately evokes the morning-after scenes in 1960s films, those moments when the heroine, still half-asleep, seems to carry the weight of the world. But with Sherman, there is no script, no dialogue, no happy ending. There is only the image, suspended in a time that belongs to it alone.

03Richard Prince: the thief of dreams

While Cindy Sherman stages herself to reveal the mechanisms of representation, Richard Prince prefers to steal other people’s images. His approach is more radical, more provocative: he creates nothing, he merely rephotographs. His Cowboys (1980–1989), those iconic images of solitary riders in desert landscapes, are actually advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes, cropped and enlarged until they become unrecognizable.

Prince does not just copy: he isolates, extracts, transforms. By removing the logo and text from the original advertisement, he reveals the mythological power of the image. The cowboy, that symbol of freedom and adventure, is no longer a mere sales pitch; he becomes an icon, almost a Jungian archetype. Yet Prince does not seek to idealize this figure. On the contrary, he exposes its emptiness. These cowboys are not heroes; they are marketing constructs, fantasies created from scratch to sell cigarettes.

One of Prince’s most controversial works, Spiritual America (1983), takes this logic to its extreme. It is a photograph of Brooke Shields, then ten years old, naked and covered in oil, taken by photographer Garry Gross. By appropriating this image, Prince does not merely question the boundaries between art and morality; he reveals how images circulate, transform, and acquire new meanings over time. Spiritual America is not just provocation: it is a reflection on how images, once freed from their context, become objects of desire, fascination, and sometimes repulsion.

04The studio as a laboratory of illusions

Behind these seemingly spontaneous images lies meticulous, almost artisanal work. In her small New York apartment, Cindy Sherman turns her bathroom into a darkroom and her living room into a film set. She makes her own costumes, glues on false eyelashes one by one, and spends hours adjusting the lighting to achieve the desired effect. For the History Portraits (1989–1990), she uses latex prosthetics, fake noses, and wigs to transform herself into eighteenth-century aristocrats, Baroque saints, or Renaissance figures.

With Richard Prince, the process is just as meticulous but radically different. In the 1970s, he worked as an assistant at Time Inc., where he had access to thousands of magazines. There, he began cutting out advertisements, photocopying them, and framing them. Later, he used a 4x5 view camera to rephotograph these images, giving them a new dimension. For the Nurse Paintings (2003), he painted directly onto the covers of 1950s romance novels, creating hybrid works where photography and painting merge.

What strikes one about their methods is their economy of means. Sherman and Prince do not need sophisticated technology; they use what is already there, repurposing the tools of popular culture to reveal its mechanisms. Their studios resemble laboratories of illusion more than traditional creative spaces. It is this approach—both humble and subversive—that made them pioneers of a new way of thinking about art.

05When the image becomes a battleground

The works of Sherman and Prince do not merely question representation; they turn it into a political and social battleground. In the 1980s, as feminism and queer theory gain visibility, their images become weapons. Sherman’s Centerfolds (1981), these horizontal-format photographs evoking the centerfolds of men’s magazines, are a direct response to the way women are reduced to objects of desire. By staging herself in suggestive poses, Sherman does not seek to seduce; she reveals the underlying violence of these images, their power to reduce women to stereotypes.

With Prince, the political dimension is more subtle but just as present. His Joke Paintings (1980–1990), canvases where raunchy jokes are hand-painted, seem at first glance purely playful. Yet they reveal a disturbing truth: laughter, like art, is often a form of domination. By appropriating sexist or racist jokes, Prince exposes their cruelty while questioning the artist’s legitimacy to act as judge.

Their works also have a fascinating legal dimension. In 2013, Richard Prince was sued by photographer Patrick Cariou for using his images of Rastafarians in a series of paintings without permission. The trial, which lasted several years, reignited the debate over the limits of artistic appropriation. The court ultimately ruled in Prince’s favor, deeming his approach "fair use." But this victory also revealed the inherent tensions in their practice: how far can one go in stealing images before becoming a mere thief?

06The legacy of a generation that changed how we see

Today, more than forty years after the first Untitled Film Stills and Cowboys, the influence of Sherman and Prince is everywhere. Their approach has inspired generations of artists, from Barbara Kruger to Ryan Trecartin, including the creators of memes who repurpose viral images with the same nonchalance as Prince appropriated advertisements.

But their legacy goes far beyond contemporary art. In a world saturated with images, where every smartphone is a camera and every social network a museum, their questions resonate with new urgency. How do we distinguish the real from the fake? Who owns an image? And above all, what happens when images own us?

Cindy Sherman continues to work, now exploring the possibilities of digital technology. Her Society Portraits (2008) and Balenciaga (2008) reveal the excesses of high society with biting irony. Richard Prince, for his part, has turned to Instagram, appropriating the selfies of complete strangers and turning them into works of art sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their approaches, as provocative as ever, remind us that art is not a question of creation, but of gaze.

07The final act: when the artist disappears behind the work

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the Pictures Generation is that its members have succeeded in disappearing behind their own creations. Cindy Sherman never appears as Cindy Sherman in her photographs; she is always someone else. Richard Prince has taken this logic to the extreme by signing works he did not create. In both cases, the artist fades away to make room for the image, as if the only way to reveal the truth were to hide.

This voluntary disappearance is also a form of resistance. In a world where the artist is often reduced to a brand, a product, Sherman and Prince remind us that the work can exist without its creator. Their images circulate, transform, take on new meanings over time. They no longer belong to them; they belong to those who look at them.

And perhaps that is the most beautiful theft of all: the one that returns images to those who have always owned them without knowing it. Us.