“Richard Prince is an obsessive collector of images, first editions, screenplays and manuscripts, artworks by artists he admires and supports, celebrity memorabilia, muscle cars, and properties—much of which bleed into his own creations. This is an abbreviated list for sure. He pays for some of these items, but others—the photographs, the pictures that produce the tattered fabrics that clothe the American subconscious—he simply takes. Prince has been stealing for decades; he is the OG artist, after Duchamp and Warhol, to help himself to what already exists in the world. And the outlaw that he is, Prince placed a number of these pilfered pictures into “gangs” coordinated by subject matter—surfer waves, muscle cars, biker “chicks,” criminals, celebrities, heavy metal bands, and so on. These are images that populate the dreams of a dropout, degenerate generation but are used by the artist with love and reverence. This is his “Spiritual America”: the realm that is tattooed on his mind and pervades in his art. Prince claims that “gang” was the word used by the photo lab in the early 1980s for the technique of gathering slides into a printed photograph. They “ganged” images together under his direction, creating grids of taped slides that were transposed into printed photographs. And I believe him. But the connotation of the word “gang”—a group of young people united by a single purpose, driven by turf wars, violence, and illicit activity—is too vivid, too evocative, to bypass here. There is a defining ethos of criminality in Prince’s work. He jailbreaks the art world, does what he wants, and we, as his audience, reap the benefit of his renegade vision”