What Can Artists Accomplish by Saying No to Trump?

In 2014, at the request of an art adviser, the artist Richard Prince agreed to select an image from Ivanka Trump’s Instagram feed and turn it into an art work. At the time, Prince’s Instagram “paintings,” inkjet prints based on unauthorized screenshots of images from people’s feeds, were generating publicity as well as controversy; his print of Ivanka—clad in a white terrycloth robe, with rollers in her hair, holding her cell phone out for a selfie as she is primped by stylists for a photo shoot—was unusual in that it was done on commission. Last week, as a gesture of opposition to Trump’s father on the eve of his Presidential Inauguration, Prince disowned the work and returned the thirty-six thousand dollars he had received for it. (It’s unclear whether it belonged to Trump herself or to another member of her family.) “This is not my work,” Prince wrote on Twitter. “I did not make it. I deny. I denounce. This fake art.” His action was reported on the front page of the Times’ arts section. Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York, could hardly contain his excitement. “A teeny thing felt deeply resonant,” he wrote in an impassioned exegesis of the artist’s words and deed. “Prince’s act of disownership opens up an incredible window of resistance to artists.”