Richard Prince's Marlboro Man (Untitled, Cowboy) sold at Sotheby's, NY's November 14, 2007 Contemporary Art Evening Sale for $3,401,000. That beat the record for a photograph at auction previously held by Andreas Gursky's 99-cent diptych of $3,346,456, which had been set at Sotheby's London on February 7, 2007. It also beat Prince's own previous record for a photograph set at Christie's, NY's May 16, 2007 Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale where it sold for $2,840,000
Considering the edition size of this copy print was supposedly only two (except for the ads themselves, of course), it is amazing how many of these have come up for auction or are in institutional collections. This one was an AP. I wonder just how many APs were produced. Most of the price difference between the Prince and Gursky auction prices--not that it really matters--was a result of the higher buyer's fees that Sotheby's had put in place later in 2007.
The only downside to this record-breaking auction for the photo market is that Prince's artist record was reset during this same sale. Instead of a photograph, which had held his record as an artist (Marlboro Man), one of Prince's Nurses paintings sold for even more than the Marlboro Man. "Piney Woods Nurse", 2002, sold at the same sale for a whopping $6,089,000 and is currently the world auction record for a work by Richard Prince.
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