This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Fondazione Prada in Venice, housed since 2011 in a Baroque palace on the Grand Canal, has a history of staging exhibitions that challenge the much larger, international Biennale with its ambition. This year’s Helter Skelter, a two-hander by Americans Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa, nods at a monumentality that, as the internet meme goes, “the European mind cannot comprehend”.
Prince, born in 1949, is best known for his obsessive appropriation of commercial and popular forms, often set within his painting or turned into sculpture. His sampling of archetypes from publicity (decontextualising the Marlboro man in a 1989 series, for example) and more recently celebrity Instagram feeds has made him a worthy conceptual successor to Andy Warhol. This practice has broken art market records and resulted in multiple copyright infringement claims.
Jafa, a decade Prince’s junior, is just as prolific a pilferer, working often with found video footage and music, as well as the still image. His references are more restrained, however, and pertain to a narrower selection of the American experience, namely, black culture and its historical and religious manifestations.
For example, Jafa’s 2016 film Love is the Message, The Message is Death, included in Helter Skelter, is an anthem composed from numerous music clips, news footage and wedding videos edited to the rhythm of a gospel choir.
Prince’s 2006 Folk Songs, installed in the palazzo’s courtyard, is an enormous hanging of blast mats made from scrap rubber tyres. Nearby stands Jafa’s eight-foot 2018 Big Wheel II taken from heavy mining machinery and wrapped in pristine steel chain that resembles exquisite jewellery. These bombastic salvos of guns, cars and industrial fantasy are the American calling card. Yet there is a perverse subtlety to their forms which, like the archetypal image of a sizzling beef steak and “freedom fries” served by a blonde in a stars-and-stripes bikini, both affirm and mercilessly lampoon American cultural identity.
Upstairs, Prince’s Entertainers, a series of totemic, orange-hued photographs of aspiring actors captured in porn cinemas in the early 1980s, face Jafa’s 2025 Viriconium, a series of cut-outs of historical figures such as Walt Whitman, Billie Holiday and Angela Davis.
The glib juxtaposition again pronounces the self-referential spiral of Americana in which the longing for fame is undistinguishable from the pursuit of freedom.
These category slips escalate in the exhibition’s aesthetic of often monochrome images. Jafa’s diptych of Mickey Mouse and a black Skeletor figure hangs near Prince’s silkscreen and acrylic conflation of these images. They reappear next on Jafa’s 2023 slideshow SloPEX set to a heavy bass beat. Meanwhile Prince’s 1986 Two of Three Worlds, a grid of photographs of the blazing sun, foreshadows the central image of Jafa’s Love is the Message.
If it is a fault of the exhibition’s curating that it becomes difficult to tell the work of each artist by sight alone, this also points to the evolution of Warhol’s regime of 15-minute fame and the democracy of consumption in the American psyche. Indeed, Warhol brought the formations in which Jafa and Prince dwell today into the regime of American art, shaping the idiom’s “vernacular edge”.
But whilst Marylin Monroe and Brillo boxes made for singular icons in the 1960s, all of Jafa’s and Prince’s subjects are, in John Steinbeck’s phrase, now self-consciously “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, that is, subjects who understand themselves as deserving of monumental elevation whatever their status.
Pairing Prince with Jafa thus makes the former artist’s work appear more overtly political than he usually does in blue-chip commercial galleries. But the exhibition also exposes Jafa as absorbed in the consumption, rather than production of images, which is hardly a political act.
Both need their subjects — Prince’s cowboys, Jafa’s everyblackman — to be like Warhol’s bottle of Coca-Cola: no better or worse than any other.
This American culture is hegemonic because even to steal from it is to propel it. As McDonald’s and rap music became ubiquitous in Europe, the post-Warholian vernacular overshadowed the legacy of Duchamp, once Europe’s greatest aesthetic ideologue.
Prince’s and Jafa’s sources are inexhaustible, but they are also exhausted. Even the critical claims they make — the latter artist’s references to the history of segregation and the country’s ongoing obsession with race — are citations from the commodity-like ubiquity of such narratives rather than direct experiential encounters.
Even the exhibition’s title, English in origin but taken by the American cult leader Charles Manson in prediction of an annihilatory race war, is a circular fiction. The helter-skelter’s chaos unfolds between the images.
The copy-of-a-copy method finds rejuvenation in the internet age which, far from making the method obsolete, only bolsters it. Prince’s 2014 series New Portraits, for example, included a photograph of Emily Ratajkowski, which the artist stole only to have the model take another selfie with it and release it as an NFT.
The images which Jafa and Prince collect long to be rendered in facsimile, their only occasionally substantive alteration negating the difference.
But that these works are on show in an Italian institution and not the official US pavilion spells trouble for America’s narrative.
The quintessentially American world of Prince and Jafa — knowingly crass, conflicted but unbothered and aspirationally kleptocratic — devoured the world. Today, even its claim on America is ripe for appropriation.
Helter Skelter continues at Fondazione Prada, Venice, until 23 November
