Two weeks after the New Yorker revealed that a “dissident-right art hos” US Pavilion was being floated for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Vanity Fair has now reported further details of the proposal, which hinges on the loan of a Titian painting from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
The proposal is the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer-turned-thinker beloved among the political far right who has called for an American monarchy. Per Vanity Fair, Yarvin is teaming up with Tarik Sadouma, a Dutch Egyptian artist, to conceive the pavilion.
The pavilion would be centered around Titian’s Rape of Europa (1559–62), which portrays the assault of Europa by the god Jupiter, who is here portrayed in disguise as a bull. The Rape of Europa has rarely been loaned.
“If we can’t get it on loan, there are a number of other things we could do,” Yarvin told Vanity Fair’s Nate Freeman. “We could, for example, hire someone to forge it and then burn the forgery. Or AI could be used in some manner, something creative would be done. But ideally, the real thing would be there.” Accompanying the Titian would be other works by artists addressing similar subject matter, which would mean the pavilion would essentially be “rape-themed,” as Yarvin put it before noting that “there’s obviously room for feminist voices here.”
A final decision on the US Pavilion won’t be made until later on in the summer. Though the application process initially ran behind schedule, leading to fears that the beginning of Trump’s second term would influence the pavilion, it is now possible for institutions to submit proposals for the show. Applications close on July 30.
Typically, the pavilion goes to an artist who is already a known quantity in the US: Jeffrey Gibson did last year’s pavilion, and Simone Leigh did the one in 2022, the same year that she took the Golden Lion’s Venice Biennale for her participation in the main exhibition.
But Yarvin told Vanity Fair that he wanted to do something different. Of the people charged with selecting the winning proposal for the pavilion, he said, “They could do the normal thing, or they could do a retarded thing, and basically take a fine art thing and put it in the hands of the American middle brow. We’re hoping to pull off our spectacular heist of the Venice pavilion, but we are, of course, up against the entire Death Star.”
