Richard Prince is the king of copyright thievery. You think the couple of hundred albums you've got copied onto your iPod might get you in a bit of trouble? Well, back in the 70s Richard started taking photographs of advertisements, calling them 'rephotographs', and selling them. You see that one up there? The rephoto of a Marlboro ad? That was the first photograph to sell for over $1million.

Trained in life painting, his day job back then was as an article clipper for Time-Life, and he was often left with magazines entirely devoid of editorial content. From these collections of glossy photographs of the American dream, in its various iterations, Prince would pick his favourites and shoot them again with his camera. Out of context, this does no more to the photographs than blur, crop or enlarge them. Once the viewer knows their origins however, a maze of deconstruction unfolds as the mid-70s high tide of advertising promises, already an illusion, is twice removed from its original subject in Prince's reproductions.

The women in his Girlfriends series were still taken from magazines, albeit from the personal pages of biker mags, where their boyfriends had sent in photographs of them seductively posing with their choppers. Another kind of advertising perhaps - certainly a posed glamour intended to impress an alien audience.

His Nurse paintings are his most recent work, and like many of his creations they seem at first to be originals. Buyer beware however, these women are taken from the covers of such pulp fiction novels as Surfing Nurse, Nympho Nurse and Tender Nurse. The images are scanned and reprinted (on an ordinary ink jet printer) and finally painted over with acrylics. The results are retitled and their faces often obscured. They have been called mysogynistic, and in association with the Girlfriend photos, it seems a convincing argument. But it's really the medium that Prince is criticising, rather than the content.

Convinced? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it's something impenetrably American - a satire that repeats itself to death, adding nothing to its intended subject but an intensely unavoidable focus. We find the same thing in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (I do not chose this book by coincidence: Prince keeps a custom-bound first edition in his study). Patrick Bateman goes to expensive restaurants, tortures prostitutes, snorts cocaine ad nauseam for 400 pages. But this kind of narrowly satirical fascination with commerce-saturated American society is intentionally overdone to the point of boredom. It illustrates the very monotony of its subject.

The problem is, we got it the first time.

This is the last time, however, that you will be able to see this particular exhibition, as the Serpentine is the final stop for a retrospective that began at the Guggenheim in his hometown of New York. It will be running until 7 Sept. For more info, visit www.serpentinegallery.org