B-SIDE-ART

  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...

The excavators were not looking for anything old. They were clearing ground for a nuclear reactor. Beneath the topsoil on England's Suffolk coast, where two power stations already hum and a third is under construction, the sand held a shape that shouldn't have still been there: a faint rectangle, its edges gone soft after nearly six thousand years, but still legible enough for archaeologists to trace. Nobody had stood inside its boundary since roughly 3800 BCE. Oxford Cotswold Archaeology, the charity conducting the dig ahead of the Sizewell C nuclear station, has identified the shape as a long enclosure — a rectangular earthwork bounded by ditches, measuring about 165 by 65 feet. Stonehenge didn't have a single stone standing yet when someone was already digging this rectangle. Long enclosures like it are rare. Unlike burial mounds or settlements, they typically held no bodies and few possessions, because their purpose wasn't storage or shelter. Most archaeologists bel...

A dealer once put a bundle of old letters up for sale. He had no idea what he was holding. The letters were signed only "a French woman." One of them was sealed shut with a lipstick kiss. That anonymity was the whole problem, and also, it turned out, the whole story. When the Kahlo scholar Salomon Grimberg finally traced the handwriting, he found himself holding something no biography of Frida Kahlo had recorded: proof of a love affair between Kahlo and the French Surrealist painter Jacqueline Lamba, written in Lamba's own hand, in the last months of 1938. For decades, Lamba has existed mostly as a footnote to a more famous name. She was the second wife of André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. Grimberg has spent years trying to correct that. The story behind the letters begins in Paris in 1934, at a café called La Place Blanche. Lamba was twenty-four, and she paid her rent by swimming, nearly nude, inside a glass tank at a nightclub called Le Coliseum, where Breton wou...