TAKE WHATEVER YOU WANT

 


Neither man in this story asked permission for anything.


Arthur Jafa splices police dashcam footage, Dylann Roof's final moments before a massacre, and grainy VHS clips of Black joy into single-channel videos that earned him the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Richard Prince rephotographs other photographers' pictures and once explained his method with disarming honesty: he never liked his own work, because he had made it — so the logical alternative was to take someone else's instead.


This fall, Fondazione Prada is publishing a 436-page book about the two of them, sitting side by side.


The book accompanies "Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince," curated by Nancy Spector at the foundation's Venice palazzo through the Biennale season. It's designed by Peter Saville — the graphic designer behind Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures — with a foreword by Miuccia Prada herself. Two artists whose entire practice runs on taking images without asking now have their conversation curated, designed, and bound by one of the most controlled luxury institutions on the planet.


Marcel_Duchamp,_1917,_Fountain,_photograph_by_Alfred_Stieglitz.jpg | Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (US, published 1917) — Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Duchamp's "Fountain." Not from the current exhibition.



Jafa, born in Mississippi in 1960, and Prince, born a decade earlier, both credit the same ancestor: Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 bought a urinal, turned it sideways, signed a fake name on it, and called it sculpture. Spector, the show's curator, has described that gesture as a form of artistic piracy. Jafa and Prince, in her framing, are Duchamp's heirs.


What separates them is what they're scavenging for. Jafa's appropriations trace a specific American violence, assembled not to celebrate that history but to indict it. Prince's appropriations run toward an ongoing interrogation of white American masculinity through the very images — muscle cars, biker gangs, pulp-novel covers — that masculinity uses to sell itself.


The exhibition's title borrows from the Beatles song, itself named for a British fairground ride. In late 1968, Charles Manson appropriated the phrase for his prophecy of an apocalyptic race war. A word for a children's amusement ride became, within months, a byword for the worst violence one group of Americans could imagine visiting on another — and now names a show funded by a fashion house.

The_Richard_Mutt_Case,_The_Blind_Man,_No._2,_New_York,_1917.jpg | Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (US, published 1917) — "The Richard Mutt Case" editorial. Not from the current exhibition.


Duchamp's urinal was thrown out shortly after he exhibited it, known today only through a photograph. A century later, the same impulse to simply take what already exists and call it art has a Peter Saville-designed cover, a Miuccia Prada foreword, and a spot on the Fondazione Prada shelf. When appropriation gets its own foreword from a fashion house's owner, has it become art history's tradition — or exactly the establishment it once had nothing to do with escaping?


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THE PAINTINGS FLEW BUSINESS. THE COURIERS FLEW HOME IN ECONOMY.

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  Before the public was let in, a curator walked the empty galleries one more time, checking the sightlines between paintings worth, by one dealer's rough guess, somewhere under ten billion dollars combined. Getting them all into one room had taken Carmen Bambach seven years and a wish list sixty-eight pages long, single-spaced. "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which just closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a three-month run, was the first exhibition of its kind ever mounted in the United States: more than two hundred works by the Renaissance master, on loan from seventeen Italian institutions and museums across Europe, assembled for a single engagement that will not travel anywhere else afterward. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Raphael, Self-Portrait (ca. 1504–06), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Raphael himself would have found the scale of the operation almost as strange as the show's opening wall text, which introduces him, in its first line, as "one of th...
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[TARWUK] A COUNTRY THAT STOPPED EXISTING

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Walk into the ground-floor gallery at White Cube's Mason's Yard and you cannot find one place to stand and see everything. The central assemblage — the artists call it a "harmonic percolator" — keeps changing meaning as you move around it. There is no correct angle. That refusal to hold still is not a formal trick. It is close to autobiography. TARWUK is the shared name of Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić, born the same year, 1981, in two different Croatian cities — Zagreb and Dubrovnik — into a country that would not exist by the time they finished growing up. Both came of age during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Since 2014 they have worked as a single artistic entity under one name. They call it, simply, a "condition." The new large-scale canvas anchoring this show — titled, in TARWUK's signature mirrored lettering, MRTISKLAAH_ećšiloduČ (2026) — makes that instability visible on the surface itself. Figures dissolve into one another mid-gesture...
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NINE YEARS ON ONE LOCKED CANVAS

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  He worked on one corner of the painting for months at a time, building up dots of paint so thin and so many that the surface started to rise off the canvas like relief. It took him nine years. He never finished it. He wasn't allowed to leave the room where he was painting it, and neither was the man he'd already killed with a knife. Richard Dadd began The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke in 1855, inside the criminal lunatic wing of Bethlem Royal Hospital — Bedlam. This July, London's Royal Academy of Arts opens the first major UK survey of his work in over a decade, bringing together more than one hundred pieces under a title that names the place plainly: Beyond Bedlam. Dadd was not, whatever his later reputation suggested, an outsider to the art world. He was a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at twenty, won medals for draftsmanship, and ran with the same rising painters who would go on to define Victorian art. In 1842 a wealthy patron invited him on a Grand...
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