Richard Prince designs drinks can

Following on from the Campbells Soup Company's issue of Andy Warhol soup cans, news reaches us of another prime artist / tinned commestible tie up. Painter and photographer Richard Prince and the AriZona drinks company have teamed up on a new drink. It's called Lemon Fizz, and according to Bevnet (not a site we read avidly at phaidon.com but apparently it's the beverage industry’s source) Prince is a fan of AriZona’s Arnold Palmer line and approached the company about a collaboration project sometime over the past year.  The drink itself is “a slightly carbonated beverage that contains natural lemon flavour, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and sucralose.” The drink will cost $.99 to $1.25 and, fittingly, will debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. 

As quoted in The Art Museum, Richard Prince is one of a number of postmodern American appropriation artists who copy their imagery from other sources. The work is concerned not with questions of craft or innovation, but rather with the meaning of signs and images that the viewer might take for granted. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a "rephotograph" of a photograph taken originally by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first "rephotograph" to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005. The photograph is a re-examination of the American myths of masculinity and a re-appropriation of the image into art from its commercial context.