The strategist: balancing his photo-appropriations with large, lush paintings steeped in modernist ambition, a major Richard Prince retrospective tweaks his reputation for artistic brinksmanship. Or does it?

As I was waiting to get my coat after viewing the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim, the man in front of me, old enough to have sampled the Borscht Belt in his youth, exclaimed to the attendant, "What a sense of humor! He's a really funny guy!" Then he turned to me and began to regale me with jokes that might easily have been emblazoned on Prince's paintings, but weren't. Inured to the practice of postmodern irony, especially the brand peddled by Prince's proponents in his early years, I was taken aback by my interlocutor's enthusiasm. For much of the artist's career, the standard analysis of his work has viewed his appropriated images and texts as critiques of American pop culture, designed to reveal the fictive nature of media images, the social construction of masculinity and the false facade of consumerist culture. In keeping with this assessment, I have never taken the jokes, or any of the subject matters in his work, at face value. But the jovial man in front of me raised a different possibility: what if the whole ironic posture has itself been an elaborate joke, and Prince is in fact completely sincere in his admiration for the seedy subcultures and suspect genres celebrated here?

Prince emerged in the New York art scene in the late 1970s on the wave of a new sensibility among younger artists who were challenging modernist assumptions about genius, originality, authenticity and artistic purity. One early manifesto of this emerging postmodernism was Douglas Crimp's legendary 1977 Artists Space exhibition "Pictures." This show, which included the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith, announced the new vogue for "appropriation" as a strategy that defanged pre-existing images by revealing their essential status as free-floating representations unmoored from any naive notion of "reality." A revised version of the catalogue essay for that show achieved iconic status when it was published a few years later in October magazine and then reprinted in that bible of postmodern theory, Brian Wallis's Art After Modernism. In his text, Crimp wrote, "Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing and staging that constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture."

Prince was not included in the "Pictures" show, and in fact, in a rather snarky 2003 Artforum interview, he claims that he declined an invitation to be in the show because he thought Crimp's essay sounded too much like Roland Barthes. Crimp, meanwhile, has denied that he ever issued an invitation to Prince. However, Prince's work, especially after he began exhibiting his rephotographed Marlboro ads in 1983, came to be identifed as one of the purest exemplars of Crimp's definition of postmodernism.

One of the things that the Guggenheim exhibition, now traveling, makes abundantly clear is how poorly this early analysis fits Prince's work, both as it has evolved and even as it first came to art-world notice. Prince's range of influences is broad, from Pop and Abstract Expressionism to Conceptualism and formalism, though his reigning guardian angel would appear to be Warhol, the first artist to blur the lines between advertising and art. Prince's swath of genres, styles and subjects is equally diverse, encompassing rephotographed ads from glossy magazines; paintings that imprint texts of off-color jokes onto canvases that reference contemporary masters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; assemblies of appropriated images of sunsets, half-naked biker chicks draped over their boyfriends' motorcycles, rock bands and surfers' waves; rephotographed celebrity head shots whose admiring inscriptions to the artist are frequently written by him; sculptures incorporating the hoods of muscle cars and planters created from splayed truck tires; and big gestural paintings based on the covers of pulp novels about naughty nurses. Nor has Prince limited himself to art objects as such. For six weeks in 1993 he filled a soon-to-be-demolished house in West Hollywood with his works. As a follow-up to First House, in 2001 he purchased an aluminum-sheathed tract dwelling near his own home in rural Rensselaerville, N.Y., and turned it into a more permanent showcase for his work. (Purchased by the Guggenheim in 2005, Second House was struck by lightning last summer and now exists as an incinerated husk.) He has even, quite contrary to the stipulations of "Pictures"-style postmodernism, taken his own photographs of the depopulated and run-down landscapes near his upstate home. Most recently he has focused on paintings that are essentially homages to Willem de Kooning's Women, here reconceived as male and female pinups created by combining acrylic and enlarged inkjet fragments from porn magazines.