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On Monday, a representative for Curtis Yarvin sent over a video that served as a preview for the influential monarchist and coder’s desired curation of the US pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. In the clip, a computer-animated Donald Trump stands on the Rialto Bridge as protesters holding “Curtis Yarvin Is the Devil” signs gather below. When digital Yarvin sends in a wave to wash away the protesters, with laser beams shooting from his eyes, they are converted to the “dark enlightenment art world.”
As the images roll over the screen, there’s a voice-over from Yarvin, who’s labeled as the “dark lord of the tech right.”
“I just talked to the undersecretary of public diplomacy and public affairs,” Yarvin says in the video, with text on State Department letterhead appearing on the screen. “We are gonna Trumpify the Venice Biennale this year. To give that world control at the Venice Biennale would be the absolutely most fucked-up maneuver ever. We’re going to go in and reconstruct the American arts with one violent executive order and take over the whole fucking thing.”
At the end, viewers see the US pavilion done up in Trumpian gold and black, à la Trump Tower. Instead of the current text above the entrance, “STATI UNITI D’AMERICA,” the text reads: “SALON DES DEPLORABLES.”
On Tuesday, Yarvin—whose radical ideas of politics and government have been taken up, to varying degrees, by the likes of JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen—was ready to reveal to me the details of his pavilion. He admitted that it is, for now, still a proposal. As I reported in May, the portal for applicants is open to all and will be accessible until July 30, but Yarvin sees a lane for himself and his collaborators. In his estimation, detailed in a memo titled “Instructions for a coup,” the applicant field has thinned since my reporting revealed that the grant documents were edited to remove references to DEI. He is betting that museums would rather boycott than take up the most prestigious perch in American exhibitions. “A vacuum has opened,” he wrote.
Two weeks ago a lengthy profile of Yarvin in The New Yorker hinted at the proposal, and reported that he had been speaking about it with Darren Beattie, the acting State Department undersecretary whom Yarvin referenced in the video. The New Yorker reported that the proposal had something to do with “dissident-right art hos.”
When we connected on Tuesday, I asked him to clarify.
“A dissident-right art ho is—first of all, you have to understand what an art ho is,” he said. “It’s sort of obvious…. To get very, very technical and psychological about it, what I would say is that—are you familiar with Maslow’s pyramid of needs?”
I wasn’t. Yarvin went on to explain it in depth—technically, 20th century psychologist Abraham Maslow called his theory on human motivation a “hierarchy” rather than a “pyramid”—before explaining that “art ho” wasn’t even necessarily gendered.
“In a way, Donald Trump himself is kind of an art ho, because he basically—first of all, he has very small, feminine hands,” Yarvin said. “But he also operates largely on the basis of a woman. Like a woman, he operates largely on the basis of intuition. He’s a very intuitive thinker.”
It was Tuesday evening in Switzerland, and Yarvin had just arrived in Basel on the day that the Art Basel fair opened to First Choice VIPs. During our hour-long video chat, as he drank a few glasses of red wine, he explained to me his concept for the pavilion in a monologue peppered with lengthy digressions—Anora is a “hardcore right-wing film,” Silicon Valley billionaires should support the fine arts, Trump and Vance are actually conceptual artists themselves—and sweeping takes on how to both interact with and subvert the elite systems that govern culture.
But above all, he acknowledged that, as someone very much outside the institutional art world establishment, he was not your typical curator of art. Why, then, had he traveled to one of its most sacred sites, Art Basel in Switzerland, and rented a flat a few minutes from the Messeplatz to host a party where he would announce his pavilion proposal in a city swimming with elite Brahmins?
“The purpose is to freak people out,” he said. “The barbarians are at the gates, right?”
“What if we do a Thomas Kinkade retrospective?” he wondered at one point during our chat. “You could do that. And it would be funny as an art prank, but I think it would get old.”
His proposal is decidedly not a Thomas Kinkade retrospective. Instead, Yarvin teamed up with the Dutch Egyptian artist Tarik Sadouma—making him an atypical choice for the American pavilion. (Yarvin acknowledged the approach was unorthodox, shrugging and offering, “We’re going to say that it’s actually my idea, because I’m an American.”)
Sadouma has a collective, The Unsafe House, based in Amsterdam. Along with Yarvin, it would curate a group show that would take as its starting point Titian’s painting The Rape of Europa, a depiction of the Tyrrhenian princess getting abducted by the Greek god Zeus. It’s currently hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but Titian, one of the greatest artists in the history of La Serenissima, initially painted it in Venice between 1559 and 1562.
“Now, we would like to get this painting on loan,” Yarvin said of the Titian, which has only left the institution once since its arrival. “If we can’t get it on loan, there are a number of other things we could do. 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.”
Using the Titian, or some version of it, as the centerpiece, Yarvin would want the artists to make work that responds to the painting and engages in its subject matter, which he admitted would be a bit controversial, but that’s the point—Yarvin told me that “art really wants to break taboos, art wants to fuck with things, art wants to fuck with people’s heads.”
Any artist would be able to submit work as long as they stuck to the Titian-related theme. The written proposal also mentioned works in other media: “podcast-format interviews, performative exercises and visual speculation exercises, and exploring American values and history through new lenses.” The programming would continue at a rented palazzo, described as “a hospitality appendices for more discrete conversations facilitated by culinary, Abrahamic enjoyments.”
I asked which artists, ideally, would apply.
“Well, what would Damien Hirst do with The Rape of Europa?” Yarvin asked. “Could we get an actual cow?” (Hirst is British.)
But the central theme would be the Titian painting, which can be interpreted not just literally but allegorically as a geopolitical jump-off point. Yarvin, at one point, started discussing the painting literally.
“Europa is getting it from this direction, she’s getting it from that direction, she’s getting it in a lot of different directions. Of course, the fact that you have a pavilion that’s rape-themed at all, I mean, that’s really…Of course, there’s obviously room for feminist voices here in the concept of The Rape of Europa.”
“Seduce,” Sadouma said. “Seduce.”
“Seduce, not rape,” Yarvin said. “Not rape, but seduce. Nobody’s forced to come into the pavilion. Nobody has to see the stuff.”
So how much of a shot does this thing realistically have? Per the fine print, applications can be sent in up until July 30, at which point the State Department, presumably with the help of the panel it has convened in the past, will look at all the applications and make a decision by early September.
“Darren and everyone in the State Department are simply trying to figure out what’s going on and what’s possible,” Yarvin said, referring to acting undersecretary Darren Beattie; Trump’s appointee for that role, Sarah Rogers, is awaiting confirmation. “And I think the question is: Do people like this, want to do something cool like this? We’re speaking to them. They’re all people who love cool ideas. They’re cool people.”
(The State Department did not comment.)
But Yarvin thinks he has a good chance of getting the pavilion. His open-ended proposal would allow for a mix of artists, and not just Trump-aligned artists.
“The ideal situation would be that artists who are very, very not Trumpists would actually submit to this contest to basically try to hack it,” Yarvin said. “‘Oh, I’m going to basically produce something so transgressive on this subject, and it’s going to be so good that they’re going to have to show it.’ And guess what? We show it.”
While he called Trump a “genius” at several points during the call, Yarvin said the revisions made to the grant proposal for the Venice Biennale amounted to, in his opinion, “the low of the Trump administration.”
“The first thing that was done with the Venice Biennale was, some low-ranking career official was asked to rewrite the grant proposal—like, ‘We’ll replace DEI with MAGA and judge your art by how American it is,’ or something,” he said. “And that’s not, I think, what we’re trying to do here.”
“We’re not going to screen them politically at all,” Sadouma said.
“We don’t just replace DEI with MAGA,” Yarvin said. “That’s so retarded.”
According to reports, the first two days of the world’s flashiest art bazaar went unexpectedly well. In the face of a softening market, and a new war in the Middle East further hammering at jittery global markets, sales in Basel actually seemed pretty solid. Gagosian sold works for more than $5 million. Zwirner sold a Ruth Asawa sculpture for $9.5 million. Hauser & Wirth reportedly brought $200 million worth of art to the fair—and sold a decent chunk of it in the first two days.
On Wednesday night, Yarvin and Sadouma opened the doors of the house they’d rented for the week to hold a small salon, for the purpose of discussing their pavilion proposal—though it was perhaps hard to compete with the principals of the high-swagger global contemporary art market packed into its historic Rhineland headquarters. At times Yarvin acknowledged that the State Department, even if it’s now staffed with employees who have been reading Yarvin’s writing going back 15 years, would probably follow the normal protocol and choose a respected American artist for the American pavilion. During Trump’s first term, his State Department chose Martin Puryear and then Simone Leigh, picks that were indisputably excellent and clearly within the elite blue-chip establishment.
“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,” Yarvin said. “We’re hoping to pull off our spectacular heist of the Venice pavilion, but we are, of course, up against the entire Death Star.”
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The post “The Barbarians Are at the Gates”: Curtis Yarvin Has Big Art Plans for the US Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale appeared first on Vanity Fair.
