Animorph Anime Painting (Reclining Nudes) 2024
interview by Oliver Kupper
Drop after drop, MSCHF continues to irreverently subvert the traditional delivery systems of both fashion and art. Last year, the Brooklyn-based artist collective’s Big Red Boot (BRB)—a "Cartoon boot for a Cool 3D World"—became a viral sensation. Though, MSCHF’s disruption isnot without a purpose; in a pervasive attention economy, virality equals creative power. The collective’s upcoming exhibition,Art 2, at Perrotin Los Angeles will explore their anarchicalantics in a commercial gallery setting, exploring fakes, forgeries, and the democratization of theart world.
OLIVER KUPPER What is MSCHF’s definition of levity through the lens of the collective’s involvement in the art and fashion world—is MSCHF an agent of chaos or of rectification?
MSCHF To some degree, humor and absurdity are core to MSCHF because that’s just how our brains work. But more generally, humor is incredibly useful as an entrypoint to critique. It draws people in and makes things accessible, and MSCHF has always been concerned with the utilitarian efficacy of our communication. Internally we talk about living in the Spicy Present—not looking to the future (everything feels stagnant), but leaning into the spiraling intensification of the present moment.
KUPPER We live in a world where authenticity plays into the post-truth ethos of our time—we are obsessed with the idea of the real even if the real seems to be slipping away. Can you talk about how MSCHF plays with authenticity in your product drops and artist multiples?
MSCHF Art 2 includes a follow-up in our “Museum of Forgeries” series. Previously, we’d duplicated a Warhol drawing 999 times before shuffling the original in to make a run of 1000 indistinguishable originals. This time, we’ve run the process for a Picasso sculpture, creating a total of 250 duplicates. Both of these objects are explorations of creation via destruction of authenticity. The authenticity gets sort of probabilistically distributed across all of our forgeries. It’s worth questioning how authenticity works, especially posthumously for artists who made huge volumes of things in their lives, and whether everything they touched becomes an artwork of stature. The Picasso we forged for this show relies on dual COAs from his occasionally-conflicting heirs (both of whom have now passed away themselves), which is the gold standard for Picasso works—but even from that sentence we can see how messy authenticity is.
KUPPER Can you talk about the collectivizing power of drop culture and how MSCHF utilizes drop culture to exemplify its message and objectives? The upcoming show at Perrotin LA will show the relic of Public Universal Car, which was part of Drop #84 Key4All, the sale of which will fund the next automotive adventure.
MSCHF Key4All is a great example of a piece where every additional participant makes the work conceptually stronger—it’s specifically leveraging and enabled by scale. For a car to travel communally across the US, it requires a minimum density of participants across all fifty (or at least the forty-eight contiguous) states. The more existing keyholder, the more interactions occur, the more fully the car fulfills its status as a commons. The Public Universal Car was on the road for nine months, across hundreds of drivers. Now, in the gallery, with its engine burned out and twenty coats of paint on it, it’s an artifact of a crowd-mediated performance.
KUPPER How has MSCHF been inspired by predecessors like Ant Farm or other radical collectives experimenting and exploring the power of mass media?
MSCHF Two groups MSCHF is indebted to are K-Hole and DIS Magazine—both of which were trailblazers for business entities that operated as art practices, while using the form of business as a cipher to present to non-art audiences. We’re also, of course, specifically interested in the power we can gain from operating as a business: the efficiency we can bring to bear in executing any and every concept, and getting it into the world.
KUPPER What is your advice to artists who want to wield more power in a world where power is so hidden, decentralized, and hegemonic?
MSCHF I’m not necessarily sure the power is hidden or decentralized. Looking at the internet, there’s an argument to be made that people are looking for decentralization, or at least for subcultural spaces. The major (centralized) internet platforms have gotten so lousy with ads and degraded user experience so much that people are searching for alternatives. Yancy Strickler writes about this in his “Dark Forest Theory Of The Internet” (stealing from Cixin Liu)—the reason you hang out in a Signal group chat is to get away from centralized power (the market forces of the public internet, which will monetize and destroy your community given half a chance). But, for creative work, the risk here, as Yancy also notes, is that embracing the dark forest means abdicating the mass and the central, which is exactly where MSCHF excels, and something we place value on precisely because there is power there. How can we Trojan Horse conceptual work into central culture? MSCHF has always tried to be off-platform. We build our own infrastructure. We’ve made something like 250 standalone websites. Platforms prevent agency, they flatten the content that lives on them, and if you get reliant on them you can have the rug pulled out from under you completely. We got deplatformed from Shopify at one point; we couldn’t sell anything. We got deplatformed from the T-Mobile network at one point; we couldn’t send text messages. Some of us are still personally perma-banned from Venmo.
KUPPER How do we bring meaning back into a world where nothing means anything anymore?
MSCHF Burn down the data centers.