What one makes of the timing of the two Richard Prince shows that opened in Paris last week depends on one's adherence to the old adage, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." The artist's expansive retrospective "American Prayer" at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and a Gagosian Gallery show of his recent works — which appropriate Willem de Kooning paintings — had been long scheduled. But when they finally opened, it was in the wake of the court ruling that Prince was guilty of copyright violations and must surrender pieces from his "Canal Zone" series to French photographer Patrick Cariou. (Prince and Gagosian, meanwhile, have filed an appeal.)

The judge's decision, and the potentially ruinous legal precedent it set for appropriation artists, did little to dampen the quiet euphoria surrounding the BNF show, and curator Robert Rubin dismissed the issue with mild irritation. "I don't consider that important," Rubin told ARTINFO. "When you're an artist and your work sells for a lot of money, people are going to come after you and try to get a piece of that. This is not the first one and it won't be the last. I'm a great believer in what Jonathan Lethem calls the 'beauty of second use' and I don't think the guy is damaged by what Richard has done."

Organizers had spared little in preparation for the BNF show. The French newspaper corps was flown out to Richard Prince's home and mini-museum in Rensselaerville and the ensuing articles were long and gushing, even though journalists found themselves denied access to the artist himself. The journalists were instead left to extract tidbits from Rubin, who is also Prince's golf buddy. Le Monde reported that super-collector François Pinault visits by helicopter, lauded Prince's book collection, and concluded that the artist was so "melted into the American culture" that he couldn't receive the press personally. While Prince traveled to Paris for the opening, his stay seemed like a gradual disappearing act.

View Slideshow: Prince of Paris?: Richard Prince Shows Electrify the French Capital, but the Controversial Artist Goes AWOL

The only reporter who appears to have met the artist is Fabrice Bousteau, editor-in-chief of Beaux Arts magazine, which published a 10-page promotional special on "American Prayer." Forced to swear that he would not take notes or record their conversation, Bousteau recounts that Prince mentioned that he was being sued by an "unknown French artist." According to Bousteau, Prince said that he would not oppose anyone reproducing his own art. The artist bitterly added that even if the French photographer's images were erased from the works in question, they would still be valuable Richard Prince pieces, while the photographer's work would remain worthless.

The BNF exhibition deserves its share of good press. It shows Richard Prince toeing a very fine (and very blurred) line between artistry, collection, appropriation, and outright usurpation. Photographs of muddy trucks hang alongside homoerotic cowboy imagery, sex cartoons and Girls of Outlaw Biker magazines, the vinyl record soundtrack to Russ Meyer's "Vixens" series, and Banksy's fake Paris Hilton CD-case. Many photographs bear autographs by actors, musicians, and celebrities — many forged by Prince himself.

One display sets Andy Warhol's banana print for the Velvet Underground against a Richard Prince nurse, with "Warhol nurse" scribbled across it — a double-layered appropriation reminiscent of Warhol's joint works with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gary Gross's famous (and infamous) photograph of a naked ten-year-old Brooke Shields appears twice, with one version enlarged and accompanied by a plaque that reads, "By Richard Prince, photograph of Brooke Shields, by Gary Gross" — a direct admission of the artists practice of "rephotographing" images, a mode of working that also yielded his famous Marlboro cowboy images.

A large wooden house, reminiscent of a chapel or barn, has been built at the center of the exhibition space to house Prince's "Untitled" series, a collection of original cover art for paperback romance and cowboy novels, for which Prince's only artistic intervention has been to frame the cover art alongside a copy of the corresponding book. "There's no artist's hand here, other than in making the frames and the trays," said Rubin. "It's clearly an art installation, but where is the artist?" the curator asked, philosophically echoing what everyone else was wondering.

Also displayed in the hut were the artist's custom-made racks for different editions of various books, among them Isaac Asimov's "I Robot," "A" by Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas's "SCUM Manifesto" and 12 copies of William Gibson's "Neuromancer." Outside the house are seedy 1970s sex books that Prince culled from the BNF collections and outfitted with new plastic dust jackets, (complete with censorship stickers). The show is accompanied by its own soundtrack, with songs by Hank Williams, The Boss-Tones, Massive Attack, and Rosemary Clooney's "Mambo Italiano."

"American Prayer" suggests that Richard Prince's art lies more in being a savvy collector and vessel for American culture than in creating individual works, making his practice broadly ephemeral — and difficult to admit as evidence in court. "By showing the roots of Prince's passions, it helps you better understand him," Rubin explained. "He's appropriating the era and making something of it that resonates for different people in different ways. The beauty of Richard Prince's art is that it's open-ended. The show unpacks appropriation in a way that should make it more resonant as an artistic practice. It also take the discourse away from 'the 'Nurse' sells for $8 million.' Who cares? Let's look at the art."

Someone at Gagosian Gallery would certainly care, where Prince's works based on Willem de Kooning's Ab-Ex figures are available for sale. Eight small collages show the Dutch-American painter's corporeal shapes, with their extra arms and legs, crudely drawn from magazine cutouts, and an abundance of torsos and genitals, exposed through trashy underwear, cut from porn and bodybuilding magazines. Eight large canvases show prints of these same collages on colored backgrounds — dubbed by Prince, in a statement, an "homage" to de Kooning.

The heavy intervention in these works (by Prince-standards at least) should keep them out of the appropriation debate. And at the gallery — where all were keeping mum about whether the de Kooning works were selling — there seemed to be little concern about this or the Cariou case. "Richard Prince has been playing this game for years," noted one smiling staffer. "He's always won; this time he lost."

At the Art Paris fair, Mark Borghi had astutely timed a Richard Prince mini-retrospective, including everything from a €3 million ($4,25 million) "Nurse" to a €12,000 ($17,000) joke drawing and the hanging cans of Prince's alter ego John Dogg — making this Dogg's first-ever Paris appearance. At least one work, the 1982 graphite sketch "Laura," sold for €30,000 ($42,700). "If anything, it makes him more famous," Borghi said of the legal feud between Prince and Cariou, adding that he, like most everybody involved in the trans-Paris homage to Prince, was still waiting for the star artist to "drop in."