Last month, timed to Art Basel, the world received a flaming shitpost of an exhibition proposal from Curtis Yarvin and Tarik Sadouma. These unlikely collaborators – one a self-styled American thinker who wants countries to have CEOs, the other a Dutch-Egyptian artist and satirist – premiered their idea with a spurt of YouTube slop. Start with golden Trump statues, cut to tidal waves washing away blue-haired protesters, then a beam of energy (possibly representing the “Dark Enlightenment,” the anti-democratic, anti-progressive, arguably neo-fascist philosophy Yarvin promotes) turns everyone into flaking ghouls with burning purple eyes. They stagger through the floodwaters, bent on occupying the most sacred redoubt of élite lefty culture: the… Venice Biennale…?
Oh, there’s more. In an interview with Nate Freeman of Vanity Fair, the post-ironic provocateurs elaborated their plan to build a group show around Titian’s The Rape of Europa (1559–62), a picture of a curvy maiden abducted by Jupiter in bull form as she frantically cries for help. The painting seems to have been pulled out of their butts mostly because it has “Rape” in the title. Since they almost certainly couldn’t secure that loan from the Gardner Museum in Boston, Yarvin says it could be cool to do, like, something with AI, or commission a forgery and then burn it. The rest of the show would be an open call.
The Rape of Europa allegorizes the ignoble foundations of the northwestern world, perhaps a little too accurately. As the myth goes, the son born of this crime founded the Minoan kingdom and thus what Western chauvinists consider Civilization. If you don’t think about it very hard, the painting’s title also resonates with replacement theory, the eschatological fear, debunked but indulged in alt-right circles, that immigration is a plot against white Europe.
Yarvin’s monarchist ideas percolate among more formidable alt-right ideologues such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Though he’s been said to mix socially with New York artist types, his sudden investment in art seems disingenuous. Hence, probably, Sadouma: a puckish painter, cofounder of an art crew called The Unsafe House. He’s also a former member of the Dutch film collective Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC, founded 2016), known for documentaries skewering art’s pretensions – for example, introducing badboy artist and animal lover Jordan Wolfson to a fur-clad collector. Sadouma parted ways with KIRAC in 2022 as they prepared to seduce the Islamoskeptic novelist Michelle Houellebecq – hardly a heartthrob – into making porn.
With their trollish powers combined, it’s no wonder that the rollout of their proposal is aggressively stupid. Yarvin and Sadouma’s stated goal is to trigger sententious liberals or arrogant globalists or whoever. There’s a good case to be made for ignoring them. (Art critic Ben Davis has made it.) The proposal, though – its form, if not its content – is clarifying. The proposal itself is the gesture – the art, even. It’s a vector of an institutional critique in limbo, somewhere between bureaucratic follow-through and futility. They say they’re really filing the paperwork; their chances are mercifully slim.
The proposal-as-art is performative. During Trump’s first term, there was a call for designs for the US-Mexico border wall. You can imagine the results. On one side were sober contractors with Cor-Ten steel pickets, on the other, protest ideas like building a wall of hammocks. In the middle was some decent art. A group called Otra Nation made renderings of the border as a hyperloop corridor that would accelerate rather than impede migration. There was also a cruel and stupid MS Paint drawing featuring a moat of radioactive sludge. Sure, any physical barrier can be breached one way or another. Trump’s wall is rhetorical.
Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1559–62, oil on canvas, 178 x 205 cm. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston
Andres Serrano, Rape of the Sabine women, I, II, III (triptych), 1990
Cibachrome prints, each 209.5 x 101.5 cm
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
It’s not about winning the bid – in fact, that would be a drag. Alt-right figures like Yarvin have built their brand around a tiresome obsession with being outsiders, and they can’t be anything else. Only by not being in the rooms where power operates can they maintain the fantasy of what must be transpiring there, sinister cabals etc. withholding the cure for cancer and sipping children’s blood like it’s Bordeaux, occasionally curating biennials.
But Yarvin and Sadouma’s proposal isn’t as scandalous as they seem to think. Given the extremity of some of Yarvin’s politics, I’m mostly surprised how un-scandalized I feel. So those slop-fueled ghouls want to ruin Venice for everyone? Good luck! They’ll quickly find that the US Pavilion is no cathedral. For one thing, contemporary art has decentralized and digitized. Most culturati experience the Biennale (and other mega-exhibitions) secondhand, as rumors, accolades, and controversies. For another, sad to say, Venice would rather you stay home. The Biennale’s opening festivities are the art version of Jeff Bezos’s recent destination wedding: an extravagant ceremony in a sinking city choked by tourists. Even if you can afford the trip, and manage to enjoy gorging on a giant group show and dozens of pavilions and off-sites, you’ll probably resent going.
Art won’t get to the next thing, and neither will its institutions, by ignoring what mass culture hacks up. The only way out is through.
Who is the Biennale for? Maybe look at how many galleries bring their Venice-bound painters to Basel. In the late 19th century, the original idea was to promote an Italian art market, and work was sold right out of the pavilions as late as 1968. Yarvin and Sadouma want to blow things up with a group show? It’s only since 1986, with Isamu Noguchi, that the US Pavilion was given to solo artists. Since then, rather than generational surveys or the spearpoint of soft power, a pavilion is often an honor reserved (at least in the US) for an accomplished, vetted, blue-chip artist. The past few laureates – Mark Bradford, Martin Puryear, Simone Leigh, and Jeffrey Gibson (2017, 2019, 2022, 2024) – delivered a polished, careful formalism that’s hard to get excited about. Especially compared to the real challenge to the old order that a sham AI Titian might present.
Andres Serrano, 2026 Venice Biennale US Pavilion proposal, rendering, 2025
Theirs is the accelerationist case. Why not take a Biennale and a US Pavilion with an increasingly narrow sense of purpose or appeal and flood it with slop? There have been noble efforts (such as the four artists above) to sell a United States that, despite electing Trump twice, can still offer a progressive, humanist example. Maybe it’s time to try something else. A more honest expression of Americana, vulgar as it may be. Give the pavilion to Refik Anadol. Give it to Beeple. Heck, give it to the Chinese TikTok’er in the tight suit who looks like Elon Musk. These are all bad ideas, yet an Anadol pavilion would still be a lava lamp version of the truly grotesque innovation at the intersection of art and tech. If Yarvin’s proposal scandalizes you, maybe inoculate yourself with a little doomscrolling. Art won’t get to the next thing, and neither will its institutions, by ignoring what mass culture hacks up. The only way out is through.
Andres Serrano seems to agree: last week, he floated a pavilion proposal of his own. The American photographer is forever known for an image called Piss Christ (1987), a crucifix immersed in urine with a bloody, enlightened glow. Conservatives made him a devil. (“I’m still a soldier of God,” Serrano told El País last year.) He’s also an ambivalent hagiographer of Trump. In 2019, he put his $200,000 collection of Trump memorabilia on display in New York. This, he submits, would perfectly satisfy the State Department’s desire for a patriotic Venice pavilion. Picture it: red hats behind glass; a TIME magazine cover featuring Trump in a king’s costume, signed by Trump; a framed display of overlarge ties – rooms full of reliquaries.
The MAGA Mausoleum idea reminds me of another body of work Serrano made in the 1990s, a group of photographic portraits of Ku Klux Klansmen in their robes. They collide with the limits of humanist art. Can the camera capture a person’s true self? What if the person hides their face in a shoddy homemade hate symbol? Serrano’s camera shows the outfits’ rough stitches and plastic snaps, homely details you wouldn’t notice in the flickering light of a burning cross. And also, the photographer, born in New York, of Cuban extraction, is in the same room. He’s wrestling with the concept of American hate, speaking to these race-proud fuckos, protected only by the thin pretense of art.
The proposal-as-art is also about partaking in systems that you don’t understand, and/or that you fear. It’s like touching Christ’s wound. Yes, the government is real. This magnificent miracle called the US Pavilion, which you thought was dead, is here in the flesh. You can put your proposal in its open call. You can feel the (broken) humanity at the core of inhuman ideas.
Andres Serrano, Klansman (Imperial Wizard), 1990, Cibachrome, 152.5 x 125.7 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels