Untitled (Cowboy)

In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who made a job by clipping articles from magazines for Time-Life Inc. staff writers. The artist began rephotographing these ubiquitous pictures, both attracted and horrified by them, utilizing a range of tactics (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to accentuate their initial artifice. In doing so, Prince weakened the pictures' apparent naturalness and inevitability, showing them as hallucinogenic fictions of society's aspirations.

Untitled (Cowboy) is a pinnacle in the artist's continuing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as current as then-outgoing President Ronald Reagan. The portrait of Prince is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertising) of a myth (the cowboy). This lone ranger, perpetually departing into the sunset, is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Untitled (Cowboy), created towards the end of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, is, in the broadest sense, a meditation on a whole culture's continuous desire for spectacle over lived experience.

Artist: Richard Prince

Price: $3.4 million