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Tate Reopens Richard Prince Room After Replacing Brooke Shields Image

from Bloomberg.com:

Tate Modern reopened a Richard Prince room that was temporarily closed on Sept. 30 for showing “Spiritual America” (1983), an image of Brooke Shields as an undressed child. The work has been replaced.

The exhibition room, which Tate was in talks with the police about, now displays another Richard Prince image, made in collaboration with Shields and titled “Spiritual America 4 2005,” Tate said in an e-mailed release. That image shows the adult Shields in a brown bikini, leaning against a motorbike.

The replacement was made “in consultation with the artist,” the Tate release said.

The catalog, which contained the original image, has been withdrawn from circulation. “Tate is in discussions with legal advisers about the catalog,” Tate said today.

“Pop Life,” an exhibition currently on at Tate Modern (Oct. 1, 2009 - Jan. 17, 2010), shows the interaction between artists, money and celebrity since the days of Andy Warhol.

The room was closed after the obscene publications squad of the Metropolitan Police visited it.

from Artforum:

The Tate Modern was to show the work as part of its larger exhibition “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” but closed the room in which it was contained after Scotland Yard warned that the Shields photograph could violate obscenity laws. The picture, which was included in Prince’s retrospective “Spiritual America” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2007, was taken by Prince from another photograph made by Gary Gross in 1976. In a statement, the Tate Modern said the photograph had been replaced with another of Shields as an adult, dressed in a bikini and leaning against a motorbike. The statement added that the change was made “in consultation with the artist.” The catalogue, which contained the original image, has been withdrawn from circulation. The Tate states that it “is in discussions with legal advisers about the catalogue.”