The master, Judd Tully, charts the rise and fall of one of Halsey Minor’s Richard Prince works to illustrate the volatile Contemporary art market:
the case of the 1989 Untitled (Cowboy), a 50-by-70-inch Ektacolor print re-photographed from a Marlboro advertising campaign. Arguably Prince’s best-known work, the image of a cowboy galloping under a bright blue sky had been the catalogue cover for the artist’s 1992 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and it became the most expensive photograph ever to sell at auction when New York dealer Stellan Holm bought it at Christie’s in November 2005 for $1,248,000.