Richard Prince and the New Meaning of High Art
Guests at Prince’s show in San Francisco got a peek at the artist’s latest paintings — and a sniff of his new cannabis venture.
Richard Prince holding his new line of marijuana, Katz + Dogg, at his launch party.
Richard Prince holding his new line of marijuana, Katz + Dogg, at his launch party.
SAN FRANCISCO — The large, brightly colored canvases sparkled beside the white walls of the Gagosian Gallery
downtown. Larry Gagosian, the art world’s megadealer, stood toward the
back of the room in blue jeans and loafers while the star of the
evening, Richard Prince, the artist perhaps best known for tweaking
iconic images and pushing the boundaries of intellectual property, stood reticently at the gallery entrance in a blazer and black Dr. Martens boots.
The only hint that this show on Thursday night might stray from the norm was the faint smell of marijuana.
Mr.
Prince, who turns 70 later this year, used the occasion to introduce
both an exhibition of his vivid, faux-primitive paintings and drawings
called “High Times” and a line of branded joints and cannabis vape pens in packaging adorned with his art.
“Everybody seems to be piling into pot,” Mr. Gagosian said.
“It’s like Clooney with tequila,” he said, referring to the actor’s brand of booze that went on to sell for around $1 billion. “Hopefully it will do as well.”
Mr. Prince at his Gagosian Gallery opening in San Francisco.
As the number of
states legalizing marijuana has grown in recent years, celebrities of
all stripes have started their own pot brands — Joe Montana, Mike Tyson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg to name just a few — but until now the high-end art world had not intersected with commercial weed.
High
Times magazine, the counter culture publication revitalized by
legalization, put Mr. Prince’s work on its cover twice in the past year,
including a garishly colored Prince sketch in the January edition with the headline, “High Art.”
On
Thursday, a fleet of chauffeured SUV limousines idled outside the
gallery, testament to the wealthy patrons who mingled inside. Selected
guests were shuttled to a nearby dispensary to test samples of Mr.
Prince’s marijuana brand, Katz + Dogg.
The
dispensary, Moe Greens, is a short walk from the headquarters of Uber
and Twitter and has a lounge where Mr. Prince’s guests sat in
avocado-green banquettes sucking on bongs and smoking joints. In a
separate room, guests stepped up to a bar where they were offered dabs,
the concentrated doses of marijuana extract that are heated and inhaled.
Guests mingled at the Gagosian Gallery on Thursday.Credit
San Francisco
has some of the country’s most stringent laws against cigarette smoking
but is also one of the only cities in the country that allows cannabis
to be smoked in what are known as “consumption lounges.”
Nate Haas, the chief executive of Moe Greens, said servers don’t spend more than a few hours at a time in the smoking area lest they get a contact high.
When
it was his turn to travel to the dispensary, Mr. Prince, accompanied by
his daughter, Ella, walked into a haze of marijuana smoke.
“Do you want to take a dab,” she asked her father, who declined.
For
Mr. Prince, his marijuana venture completes a journey that began in the
1960s. He says the first time he tried marijuana was after flying to
Los Angeles in 1967 from his home near Boston. He saw a Doors concert
and then went to a party in Laurel Canyon where he was offered weed.
“I was already interested in art and music,” he said. “It seemed like a kind of a natural fit.”
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