In my presentation I will talk about the artist Richard Prince, especially about his work Spiritual America.

Richard Prince is an artist that was born in 1949. He is best known for his technique of rephotography, a formal descendant of Marcel Duchamp's readymades in which the artist takes pictures of pre-existing photographs. This process of rephotographing continued into 1983, when he exhibited a work that was named Spiritual America, where he appropriated of a photo of Gary Gross, an American fashion photographer.

I am interested in this work because the gesture of Prince was make a critical message and met with controversy and confusion for it's spectacular sexualization of a minor, soliciting at once desiring gazes and outraged condemnation.

In Prince's hands, the pedophiliac image provided a way of unlocking the paradoxical nature of this country's collective spiritual disposition. If there is a "religious power" to Prince photo, it has to do in part with its function as an icon of American sipirituality and a corresponding contradictory moralism.