By Marcus Bennett

During the 61st Venice Biennale, with no serious American Pavilion on offer, Fondazione Prada served up the replacement: Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, curator Nancy Spector's two-artist exhibition at Ca' Corner della Regina, running 9 May–23 November 2026. Whispers around the lagoon called it the unofficial US pavilion. That, reviewers agreed, is exactly what it felt like.

Spector stakes the show on juxtaposition. Arthur Jafa (b. 1960) and Richard Prince (b. 1949), a decade apart, have never before shared a formal conversation. Both inherit Duchamp's readymade — the shift from making to taking, recast as image piracy without permission. Why put them together? The belief that two scavengers, side by side, might reveal something neither could alone.

The pairing is asymmetric, and the show knows it. Prince has spent four decades working over American desire and white masculinity, from rephotographed Marlboro cowboys to Instagram grabs that landed him in well-documented legal trouble. Jafa has wrangled the visual archive of Black American life into something heavier. Placing Jafa's grief beside Prince's irony risks aestheticising the former while lending the latter a gravitas inseparable from his accumulated prestige. Curatorial goodwill can't neutralize that.

What holds the show together?

America itself: its grit, grift, death, subcultures and self-mythology. The fulcrum is the room projecting Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) — built from found footage, dashcam recordings and viral clips, scored to Kanye West's Ultralight Beam. Joy and catastrophe are cut so close together that viewers smile, cry and rage in succession. Writer Christina Knight has pushed back against reading the film purely as spectacle of Black suffering; for Black viewers, she suggests, the collapse of joy and violence registers as a mode of recognition within contemporary America. Isolated rooms away from Prince's cooler material, the film would otherwise, as one reviewer put it, suck everything into its orbit.

The title itself carries baggage. A McCartney-penned Beatles track from The White Album, the phrase Charles Manson seized on to prophesy an apocalyptic race war, and the name of a 1992 MOCA exhibition criticised for excluding Black artists. Reclaiming it now, co-headlined by a Black artist, is a pointed corrective. Spector calls it an "unruly readymade" — a contaminated cultural object converted, through selection alone, into a frame for critique.

The most intimate offering is a collaboratively conceived zine, assembled from images the two artists exchanged while the show was being built. It reads like two sensibilities testing common ground in real time rather than being paired by curatorial fiat. Jafa, in a video interview, put it plainly: "when I grow up, I want to be like Richard Prince." The affection is palpable.

What does this change for Venice?

Plenty. During Biennale week, the city now belongs as much to Prada, Pinault's twin outposts at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, and a widening cast of private foundations as it does to the national pavilions. This parallel, better-funded circuit sets the terms for what gets discussed, photographed and remembered. Just as Jafa and Prince take images without permission, the foundations have taken hold of Venice's civic fabric, converting the city itself into something closer to a readymade backdrop for brand-building. The strongest offerings this year came from such spaces.

The verdict? The show rewards skepticism, and the asymmetries — of race, register, stakes — are real. But it is most honest when it leaves them unresolved. Ca' Corner della Regina's faded grandeur makes an apt stage: a European palazzo reflecting the new world's chaos back at itself. Whether the Jafa–Prince affinity is truly elective or simply convenient, the encounter generates real heat — and with Fondazione Prada and its peers increasingly setting Venice's agenda, that heat will keep drawing the crowds through November.