Arthur Jafa: ‘America has always been a demonic state. And we love it’

The Art Newspaper profiles “Helter Skelter: Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa,” a two-artist exhibition at the Prada Foundation’s Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, presented during the Venice Biennale and curated by Nancy Spector, former Guggenheim New York artistic director and chief curator. Spector, in her first institutional survey project since leaving the Guggenheim in 2020, stages a call-and-response installation of more than 50 works by Prince and Jafa across the 17th-century palazzo’s baroque rooms. The article recounts Prince’s influence since the late 1970s through rephotographing unlicensed commercial images, and notes Jafa’s rise after his 2016 New York debut of the seven-minute video Love Is The Message, The Message is Death, which Spector links to Prince’s early-1980s Sunset photographs. Jafa discusses how appropriation and “theft” carry different meanings for Black Americans, and the show includes works such as Jafa’s chained truck tire sculpture Big Wheel II (2018) alongside previously unexhibited Prince works.

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