{"id":1838547,"date":"2026-03-20T14:57:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T11:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1838547"},"modified":"2026-03-20T14:57:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T11:57:35","slug":"jordan-wolfsons-newest-provocation-is-a-creepy-prada-ad-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1838547","title":{"rendered":"Jordan Wolfson’s Newest Provocation Is a Creepy Prada Ad Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tPrada\u2018s current ad campaign for its Spring\/Summer 2026 collection is an unsettling affair, and no surprise its maker is an artist known for disturbing video art and sculptures: Jordan Wolfson, whose past works have featured a gyrating cyborg, chained-up puppets, and other terrors.<\/p>\n
\n\tWolfson\u2019s art is famous\u2014and, in some cases, notorious\u2014for its depictions of violence, both of the physical and emotional variety. A VR work that he produced for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, for example, allowed visitors to witness a man being bludgeoned by a version of Wolfson himself wielding a baseball bat. Another VR work made last year for the Fondation Beyeler, a museum just outside Basel, Switzerland, body-swapped its participants, without much warning to viewers in advance that this would happen.<\/p>\n
\n\tMercifully, the Prada campaign includes no such instances of carnage, but it does maintain Wolfson\u2019s ongoing fascination with bizarre digital avatars. Its still images feature a range of models\u2014including the actors Carey Mulligan, Nicholas Hoult, and Damson Idris\u2014standing beside larger-than-life birds that seem more than a little menacing.<\/p>\n
\n\tWolfson first made his name as a video artist, and the Prada campaign also includes a short moving-image work that is billed as his first foray into the medium since Riverboat Song<\/em>, his acclaimed 2017\u201318 piece. In the new video, Prada\u2019s models numbly into the word \u201cI\u201d a few times, then at last utter the phrase \u201cI am.\u201d These words also constitute the title of the campaign, which is called \u201cI, I, I, I AM\u2026 PRADA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\n\tAs Wolfson\u2019s subjects say those words aloud, the birds nearby them\u2014which appear to be computer-generated, or at least computer-altered, given their sheen and their unnatural size\u2014slowly move around. When the actress and model Hunter Schafer appears here, a bird-man hybrid with black leather boots ominously raises its hands behind her, gazing directly at the viewer while breathing deeply. Schafer, beaming, does not seem to notice the creature behind her.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn a statement accompanying the campaign, Prada praised Wolfson\u2019s contribution for opening \u201cceaseless possibilities, multiplicities of identity and being, of what Prada can be, how it can be perceived, and re-perceived, through constantly-questioned conventions of an advertising campaign.\u201d This seems like a twee reading of a campaign that is designed to creep out and entrance in equal measure. If anything, Wolfson\u2019s newest works seem to undermine fashion brands\u2019 unique ability to defang the art produced for collaborations.<\/p>\n
\n\tBrands from Dior to Louis Vuitton have in recent years tapped artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Cosima von Bonin, Tyler Mitchell, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Julien Nguyen, and Isabella Ducrot\u2014to name just a few\u2014for collaborations in recent years, both to produce fresh works for runway shows and to help conceive ad campaigns like the new one by Prada. The trend led Art in America<\/em>\u2019s Emily Watlington to write, in 2024, \u201cWe should be asking, is fashion supporting the arts or is it subsuming them?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/cq5dam.web_.3360.3360.jpeg?w=1024″] Prada\u2018s current ad campaign for its Spring\/Summer 2026 collection is an unsettling affair, and no surprise its maker is an artist known for disturbing video art and sculptures: Jordan Wolfson, whose past works have featured a gyrating cyborg, chained-up puppets, and other terrors. Wolfson\u2019s art is famous\u2014and, in some cases, notorious\u2014for its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1838547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1838547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1838547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1838547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1838547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}