By Cody Elliott
Sean Fader is a multimedia artist living and working in New York City. He holds degrees in photography, theater, visual arts, is represented by Denny Gallery, and includes Gagosian Gallery in the list of places that have shown his work.
In 2014, one of his pieces featured on Instagram – Wishing Pelt – was appropriated by the artist Richard Prince and displayed, with Prince’s comment, as part of Prince’s New Portraits series at Gagosian. Before Prince used an Instagram image from the work, Wishing Pelt was a performance piece where Sean Fader stood silently as strangers would rub his chest hair and whisper wishes into his ear.
All of the content for the New Portraits was mined from Instagram profiles, without consent. This revelation, alongside several lawsuits, caused a media frenzy around the series, and Prince closed the show early.
Unlike the others, Fader made a choice to re-appropriate his work. Fader used a print out of Prince’s piece, added a print out of his own Instagram comment, and displayed it in a group show addressing appropriation at Denny Gallery: Share This: Appropriation After Cynicism.
In response to this new work, Prince referred to him as a “Vampire” on Twitter.
Can you tell me how it was that you found out, and what it was like to find out, that your work was being used in the New Portraits?
Because that piece was intended to be both a performance on Instagram and a performance IRL, people started tagging me on it. So I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what it was. September – on a side note, I had just gotten Lyme disease, and my best friend and mentor had just died. [Prince] opened that show in September, and so then this journalist reached out to me and I was like, “Oh of course, this is just what’s going on in my life, everything is going to shit right now.” You know, kind of just moved on, with that, I have to deal with my mentor and best friend’s death and my health is fucked right now. And then I went to see it, there’s a lot of conversations about what should I do, I know I needed to respond but I didn’t know what the right response was. You know, and, about 50 percent of my friends were like “Oh your famous now,” and the other 50 percent were like “you need to sue him.“
What made you decide not to sue him?
Because it was uninteresting. The work is this new kind of authorship in digital spaces, collective authorship. If I sued him it would go against the work. I did entertain the idea, I spoke to a lawyer about it, and I wanted to know where my rights stood. I went to see it before my friend’s funeral, and it did make me really angry. It’s not because he used that photograph, but like he didn’t pull from a selfie, he physically walked up to my work, took it off the wall, and put it in another gallery and called it his. So I felt really different about the use of my work versus the use of like, selfies and reposted images. But when I walked in and saw the work what made me angry was that it’s terrible. That the work is just bad. I think the best comment on it is that “Watching Richard Prince comment on Instagram is like watching your dad try to rap.” That’s a quote by another artist. I think we would call that hashtag basic.
Patti Johnson talks about Richard Prince, is like colonizing work. He takes this queer performance piece that is supposed to be free for everyone and does all the douchiest things to try to create worth in an art market. He makes it big, unique and a painting. Which is actually against the space of the Internet and directly against the work that I was making. It’s white privilege colonization that bothers, which is the history of his work – colonialism. What he’s done is become the ultimate author, where everything is his. It’s directly against why [Prince’s] early work is interesting.
It’s also just bad. I walked in there and I had so much anger in me, because the work is terrible, so there’s nothing interesting to say about it. If it were like brilliantly appropriated we would be having a really different conversation.
Do you think those reasons are why you participated in, Share This Appropriation After Cynicism?
I was coming back from the memorial of my mentor, and I was like “What would fucking Barbara DeGenevieve do.” She would fucking take her work back, from the person that stole it from her.
It became very clear to me, to get this conversation to a bigger space.
I think there a lot of great options; we support artists in this country. We accept that the creators of cultural capital are not being paid for what there doing but that cultural on mass is actually banking so we institute like every other First World nation, policies that protect artists, so they can continue to be cultural makers.
Do you think we have copyright policies in place that support artists?
(Laughing) No! So I ran the numbers, and what, I could get $2,000? Or I could think about this in a different way, beat him at his own game and get this in a bigger arena, which is why he hate tweets about me and I just find that funny.