Eric Doeringer
Eric Doeringer (born July 1, 1974) is an artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Brown University in 1996 with a B.A. and received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999. "Bootleg" paintings {{Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center | align = left| width = 33% | quote =[Doeringer] has come under some opposition for his stance on [copying pictures] and has received more than one cease-and-desist order from galleries and artists, but has also received praise for his activities with purchases from a few of the artists he appropriated. Viewers seem to be split, calling him either a pirate or a virtuoso.| source = Reading Eagle, April 13, 2008}} Eric Doeringer's "Bootlegs" are small copies of work by eminent contemporary artists including Richard Prince and Lisa Yuskavage. Doeringer reproduces the artworks using "collage, digital photography, paint and varnish". Doeringer can make between six and fifteen paintings each day and told The New York Times in a 2005 interview that his process is "like an assembly line". On Saturdays beginning in 2001, he set up a vending table in Chelsea, Manhattan on West 24th Street. Small canvases reproducing contemporary paintings lined the table. Paintings by the original artists (sold within a short walking distance from Doeringer's stand) cost tens of thousands of dollars, while Doeringer's copies sold for less than $100. His total profit in a day of selling paintings has sometimes reached $1500. Time Out stated that Doeringer is "famous for bootlegging art on the streets of New York". According to Doeringer, the majority of the artists he copies do not mind, while others have sent him cease-and-desist letters. Richard Prince was a "fan" of his work, while Takashi Murakami put a stop to his copies. Doeringer states that his work is fair use because he "culled the pictures from the public domain of the Internet". In 2005, Chelsea art dealer Mike Weiss called the police to remove Doeringer's Bootleg stand from 24th Street. Weiss told The New York Times that "he did so for reasons that might be condemned in the art world but that made perfect sense for any businessman like himself who has to pay a huge rent" and claimed Doeringer was "an opportunist and that he just wants his 15 minutes". In 2007, Doeringer sold his wares in the Geisai Art Fair in Miami. For the fair, he crafted 42-cent stamps decorated with pictures of celebrities. The stamps, which cost $1, were legally usable as postage and were decorated with photographs of eminent people in the art world. Over his booth, Doeringer placed orange and neon signs that proclaimed "Best Art Deals in Miami" and "Nothing Over $250!" The New York Sun deemed his decorations "a pitch-perfect metamockery of the art fair's commercialism". Conceptual art recreations In 2008, Doeringer began making larger, more faithful recreations of works of Conceptual art by artists like Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Edward Ruscha, and On Kawara. New York