A new book by Richard Prince. It was put together by the Biblitheque Nationale De France and the Gagosian Gallery.

Preface:

The Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) is proud to host the first major museum exhibition in Paris devoted entirely to the work of Richard Prince, the idea for which was hatched during a visit to the artist's studio arranged for me by Bob Rubin.

This unprecedented encounter between contemporary art and the book, between the library and the creator, foregrounds one of the most underappreciated and singular aspects of Richard Prince's work. For more than thirty years, the artist has collected major twentieth-century books and manuscripts that, as the exhibition highlights, provide essential inspiration for his work as a contemporary artist. To delve into a five-hundred-year-old national library, and in doing so to establish a dialogue between the United States and Europe, and between high culture and popular culture, was Richard Prince's challenge. And he rose to this challenge by finding and appropriating, in suprising fashion, examples of popular genres within the BnF's holdings-supermarket novels, science-fiction novels, adolescent fanzines, and so on-and creating wonderful works of art with these frequently overlooked documents. In an amusing twist of fate, these postmodern readymades will now be included among the library's rare books.

I offer my warmest thanks to Richard Prince for sharing with us his vision of BnF, which, in preparation for this exhibition, became his own private "bookstore" or ideal library; and for giving us, at the same time, deeper insight into his multifarious oeuvre.