While we’re on the subject of no, there’s always Peter Schjeldahl on Richard Prince:
The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture. (Koons tried, but his attempt was too weird for comprehension, let alone assent.) Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. (more)
Just because he’s all bah-humbug to other artists doesn’t mean his work’s no good. The Peter S. review doesn’t compute in your context.
I, like, totally agree with Richard’s sentiments. I don’t even like 99% of my own stuff. The 99% exists in order that 1% can be and is killer-transcendent. Of course, you already knew this.
Molly. If he’d said he doesn’t like 99 percent of his own work, he’d sound like less of a jerk, but it would be bad for his market.