Assembled in roughly chronological order, the show charts Prince’s development from downtown bad boy to upstate squire who, moved by the plight of his less fortunate rural neighbors, pilfers the detritus of the underclass to celebrate America’s losers. This last notion—that the artist champions the downtrodden like some postmodern Walker Evans—is absurd if not delusional, but it raises an interesting point about Prince’s self-image as an outsider: More than anything, the exhibit suggests that he’s been a sort of performance artist whose plastic output is part and parcel of a carefully crafted persona.

Unquestionably, Prince has been influential. While generally credited for pioneering appropriation art, his true métier has been as a channeler of the male psyche aggrieved by the postfeminist world—a role later assumed by artists as different as Matthew Barney and John Currin. But the most important aspect of Prince’s career has been its relationship to Andy Warhol’s, an artist with whom he’s frequently compared. If Warhol was the pope of Pop Art, Prince was arguably its Martin Luther, nailing his theses of reformation onto Warhol’s cathedral of celebrity. If Warhol largely went for the icons set off by the velvet ropes of our collective consciousness, Prince preferred the crowd left out in the cold: the Marlboro Men and romance-novel covers crafted by faceless hacks; the anonymous snapshots of women on choppers sent to motorcycle magazines by their boyfriends; the trailer-park tire planters marking the line where hope runs out and resignation sets in.

Taken as a whole, however, the work seems to be less a jaundiced unpacking of the national id than a cynical exploitation of the same. It doesn’t help that Prince’s default tone is hostile reticence, or that he relies over and over on the same Minimalist tropes (grids, for example). But mostly the problem is that a lot of what he does lacks visual impact. Consider the earliest images that won him attention, the late-’70s photographs of advertising tear sheets featuring wallets and such. Obscured for so long by critical approbation, they are startlingly bland and opaque here.

The show definitely picks up with Prince’s best known series, the cowboys taken from campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes. Beyond deconstructing masculinity or noting the irony of evoking the old West to sell cancer, Prince’s point seems to be that American life, with its restless quest for the next frontier, is an illusion anyway, so you might as well kill yourself. Needless to say, he never fulfilled a death wish (unlike his hero, Lenny Bruce), settling instead for the more comfortable position of the dime novelist selling his story—the myth of the myth—to sophisticates back East. That he views them as suckers may be inferred by American Prayer (2007), the sculpture greeting visitors as they enter. A ’60s muscle-car shell resembling the rusting hulks that dot abandoned farms, it’s as specific an object as Donald Judd might have rendered. But sitting in a collector’s home, it would function more like the Petit Trianon—a focal point around which today’s Marie Antoinettes can dress up and play shepherdess.

All of this would matter less if we got some sense of who this artist is. Instead, we’re given “Richard Prince” and a lot of posturing. Warhol may have been a cipher, but ultimately his work reveals him to be a devotional person, seeking the light. “Spiritual America” offers only a portrait of the artist having his cake and eating it, too. You wonder whether he knows it’s poisoned.