NO MORE TEARS, I’M LOVIN’ IT Mischievous MSCHF Takes Over Perrotin Gallery NYC

One day, swiping through my Instagram stories, I saw something like a funky streetwear graphic. Weird, I thought. I don’t follow any streetwear-type accounts. When I turned my eyes to who posted it, it was the Perrotin gallery. An artist collective, MSCHF, was opening its first show—not with generic paintings or sculptures, but with some warped sneakers and foot pictures instead. I was successfully convinced by their viral marketing to make a trip down to New York.

When I visited on the second day of its opening, I entered excited but ready for possible disappointment. How long could I possibly spend looking at a show full of readymades? Yet I walked in with the attitude of a customer, knowing that all works on display were on sale.

The first thing I saw were eight iPhones, each locked up in an aWcrylic case and protected with a lock. Inside each were the phone numbers of 17 celebrities. The list included people like Lil Yachty, Ivanka Trump, and even Emmanuel

Perrotin. Passwords are not included in the sale, though. The locked iPhone can either be zero value or a few grand, but no one knows for sure if the phone numbers are actually in there. This raises a question on the ironic concept of celebrity culture—how valuable can one’s phone number be, and who would be willing to spend so much money on these potential assets?

Next up, AI generated feet pics that can be purchased by contacting the gallery. The series is titled “This Foot Does Not Exist,” suggesting that since all of the pictures are generated by the computer and do not belong to anyone, it disrupts nobody’s privacy. How tempting is that, a foot pic that won’t get you into any trouble? Using a technique called Generative adversarial network (GAN), MSCHF will send the clients newly generated foot pictures on demand. The group seems to know what people secretly want, and it brings these desires to public art spaces so that we end up laughing at ourselves.

What I was most excited to see was the piece Severed Spots. The group purchased a $30,000 print of Damien Hirst’s Spot series, cropped out each individual spot, signed them, and framed them for sale. They generated a total of 108 artworks from a single Hirst work. Each spot was resold for $480, and the empty grid of white paper was also for sale. What surprised me the most was that about a dozen of them were already sold on day 2.

What does this say about the art world? It seems like MSCHF makes a satire of how today’s investors buy a fraction of expensive artworks just for the feeling of owning them. Just by being the middleman and adding their own signature, MSCHF makes hundreds of dollars, and there are enough people to be foolish customers for them.

Before I stepped out of the gallery, I noticed that I hadn’t seen the work Chanel Diffuser. After combing through the entire gallery again, I saw a tiny bottle at the corner of the room. To see if it smelled like Chanel N5, I crouched down and brought my hand up to inhale the scent. What was I doing? Finding myself sniffing at the corner of a white gallery was quite hilarious indeed. Honestly, I did not have to smell it to know that it was the real Chanel N5, but I just wanted to. Placing an artwork at the most uncomfortable location forces engagement and deconstructs the norms of a gallery experience.

MSCHF started with two creative and rebellious guys who met in college, and is now a group of over 30 people working with an intent to satirize and critique. The entire show is based around making fun of aspects of American culture— ranging from conspicuous consumerism to digital identity, artistic ownership, paparazzi and more. It makes us laugh at our own selves and think, what kind of world are we living in?