December 2025
I’m always interested in where art meets reality, and this is a document of the two bumping up against each other for almost seven hours. A videotaped testimony for a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by two photographers whose work Prince appropriated for his 2014 series “New Portraits,” Deposition, 2025, is a great trickster move and an important historical artifact, a Tilted Arc trial for the Pictures generation. Packed with quotable quotes (“The way that you said that makes it sound simple, but when you are the first person to do it, it’s not simple”; “I will give you $1000 if you can tell me the name of the president of France when Gauguin was in Tahiti painting his paintings”; “You have to have guts to make great art”), it also has lawyerly spats, sidewinding autobiographical digression, healthy ego expression, strategic Warholian vagueness, Bob Dylan, and a leisurely stroll through Prince’s life and career, full of behind-the-scenes how-I-did-that and why-I-did-that Easter eggs for Prince enthusiasts like myself, all of it set to the soft background percussion of a stenographer typing. Its key exchange might be, Attorney: “Do you seek permission?” Prince: “I give myself permission.” I can’t wait for the Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher version.
