For some reason, at one point the print cost $875, despite explicitly costing $750 or $950.
Reader Matt pointed us to this item at Exhibition A, a print derived from the Richard Prince-designed cover to Bill Powers’ new book, What We Lose in Flowers. It’s a medium-sized inkjet print of a nude woman, whose genitals are covered by a DVD label bearing the title and author of the book. It’s in an edition of 100, and costs either $750 or $950, depending on how quickly you buy.
The print went on sale at noon today. Thirty minutes later, when we saw it, the print had sold out.
Two possibilities:
- Powers’ fiction debut, Tall Island, a Sex-and-the City-esque tale of smart, sexy, wealthy New Yorkers figuring out how to interact with other humans, earned him a fanatical audience after garnering rave reviews; in one of three Amazon comments, for instance, a former employee of his wife said of the book, “u feel like u know these charcters.” That audience, spurred by a deluge of pre-publication press about What We Lose in Flowers…, purchased $81,000 worth of Prince prints from the website in less than 30 minutes, despite Exhibition A prominently warning that there would be a “limit of three prints per customer.” Exhibition A considers moving the sold-out print to the Archive section of the site, along with every one of the dozen or so prints that have sold out in the history of the site, but either a computer glitch or a stroke of marketing genius keeps the item in the Shop section, next to the book and eighty-odd other prints which are still for sale.
- Something’s fishy here.
