Emerging in the 1980s, Richard Prince combines the media of painting, artist's books and photography to offer peculiar views into the margins of American culture.Prince's highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes in the style of 1960s cartoons, Marlboro cowboys and motorcycle gangs - is central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and began to re-photograph advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly-familiar 'pop' imagery. Recently his work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene.

Rosetta Brooks is an art critic and curator based in Pioneertown , California. She is currently a Core Faculty member of the MA in Art Criticism and Cultural Theory at the Art Center, College of Design, Pasadena, California. Formerly editor of the London-based ZG magazine, Brooks edited Richard Prince's 1992 catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has written extensively on such artists as Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg, Sigmar Polke and Victor Burgin.

Jeff Rian is a writer and Professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes. He is an editor of Purple magazine, a regular contributor to Artforum and the author of Buckshot Lexicon (2000) and Lewis Baltz (Phaidon, 2001).

Luc Sante is the author of Low Life (1991), Evidence (1992), The Factory of Facts (1998) and Walker Evans (Phaidon, 2001), and co-editor of OK You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors (1999). He teaches Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.