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...