To liberally paraphrase Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall,” in the summer, a young artist’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the forthcoming 2026 Venice Biennale. With the application for proposals for the United States Pavilion (focused on “American Values”) open through the US State Department until July 30, so many proven, conscientious, and qualified artists are hoping to secure the chance to show the very best the nation has to offer!
… Except for at least one relentlessly cheugy far-right shit-poster and software developer, seeking to create a new low cultural watermark in the city more recently famous for its rising tides. Not content to merely contribute to the disintegration of democracy here at home, self-proclaimed “Dark Lord of the Tech Right,” malignant idiot, and monarchist Curtis Yarvin just released a proposed “Venice Biennale Coup” on YouTube that suggests his next goal is to bring disgrace and put it on display at the world’s oldest recurring international art exhibition.
“So do you want to start a revolution in art, as well?” That’s the questions that touches off the approximately one-minute video preview, posed to Yarvin by Dutch Egyptian artist Tarik Sadouma, who is collaborating on the as yet (thankfully) hypothetical project. But don’t worry! As Yarvin reassured Vanity Fair in a lengthy, unhinged, and seemingly unredacted interview, given the generous usage of the r-word, “We’re going to say that it’s actually my idea, because I’m an American.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that Sadouma’s nationality is definitely not among the major issues with the proposal. The project is variously framed by its creators as “SALON DES DEPLORABLES,” a “hardcore right-wing film,” and a sort of MAGA cultural gang-bang centered around the Titian painting “The Rape of Europa” (1559–1562), which Yarvin hilariously thinks the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum would loan to him. But while we’re counting, neither Titian (Venetian), nor Damien Hirst (British), both of whom Yarvin name-checked as a brilliant potential participants, are American, either. It’s frankly concerning that anyone as supposedly right-wing as Yarvin is having this much trouble tracking the citizenship status of other people!
As for the “Coup” video itself, we must grant that it has done something previously thought to be impossible: It has produced a piece of media more ill-conceived, needlessly offensive, and vacuously culture-mashing than the 2022 NFT collaboration between Madonna and Beeple. With its fascist posturing, suggestion of militarized violence, laser light shows, and relentless ego-buffing in the form of giant statuary, it’s like World War Z but with fascists instead of zombies (and also on the side of the zombies). Yarvin is trying really hard to appear transgressive, yet somehow also copying the now 30-year-old aesthetics of HIStory, the 1995 Michael Jackson world tour trailer that touted almost identical motifs — albeit with MJ’s production featuring fewer laser zombies and burning Pride flags. That’s all in addition to being immature, pointlessly offensive, and seeming to vaguely intimate a desire to rape Europe — which will be (checks notes) hosting the installation.
In a way, it is perfect. And in another, more accurate way, please put Curtis Yarvin out to sea atop the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where he can become the dark tech lord of the seagulls or whatever, and perhaps found the inaugural Trash Island Biennale, comprised of creatures screeching over hot garbage at each other — an undertaking for which I will be the first to say he is uniquely, and deeply, qualified.