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The persistence of chaos feat. MSCHF

The internet’s a playground.

It’s easy to forget: headlines often point us to the lowest common denominator vitriol.

But ask MSCHF – it’s all a game.

They’re a little hard to pin down, but mostly are referred to as an art collective. The work they do fits that mould, sure – art defiantly created for the attention economy. The slipperiness is deliberate, and helpful: it stops people like me wondering if they really are an art collective or just co-opting the language to seem cooler than just another product company.

They’re easy to laugh about, but also easy to admire at a time when many in the arts are asphyxiating from lack of capital. MSCHF took a different path: serious injection of (private, commercial) investment, sizeable team of 25 or so, and abandoning the early client-funded work to instead pursue their own installations, products, moments and collaborations that maximise attention and sell out in minutes.

At their best, they transcend subcultures and cross boundaries. When the infamous MSCHF red boots out, you would hear about it everywhere on the timeline, not just fashion blogs.

There have been collabs with superstars, forged Warhols. They happily deconstruct the tensions in the art world, like the ATM at Art Basel that read the bank account of anyone who used it and put it on a public wealth leaderboard.

One of my favourites is beautifully simple – The Persistence of Chaos, a working laptop loaded with the most destructive computer viruses ever created; like a lab vial full of bioweaponry. There’s something nostalgic about it, like early internet art, the kinds of things William Gibson was doing.

When they release work, it’s clearly done through controlled chaos. There’s a cost model in there somewhere, an equation that works backwards from the next big hit. The forged Warhols feels like more than just a bit, most of their work has a touch of Andy’s fingerprints.

Thinking about MSCHF within the realm of art might be a little discomfiting for some. The chaotic nature of projects, the lack of a true house style, the weird inclusions in the team (The ex-Buzzfeed founder? Hiring the guy who created Wordle?). They feel like an anarcho-creative agency, one that acts like most agencies wish they did, on their own terms, making their own work.

The commercialisation, the tackiness, the calculated way of seeking an audience might all feel a little crass to those of us in concrete gallery vaults, sipping red wine from plastic cups.

But there is an impenetrability, a joie de vivre in their unhinged imagination. It feels present and slightly futureproof. Whatever new thing comes, whatever trend or technology, innovation, they could just absorb it, embrace it, take the piss out of it. Commercialise it.

Vertically integrated, from concept and creation to the sale, it’s Banksy without the pseudo-socialism, it’s art that has totally embraced industry.

I think about them, in the light of performance artists who dance next to works valued at 1,000x their worth, amid catering that costs more and whose bills are settled sooner.

I think about them relative to aspiring painters at the mercy of galleries, who would never dare sell their art on Instagram because then institutions might not take them seriously.

MSCHF are the ones cutting up a Damian Hirst.

MSCHF is a demonstration of a highly capitalised vision of the future for art. Run by corporate anarchists, it embraces a different process, a different commercial model, a different go-to-market entirely.

Attention is the outcome. Controversy is the product.

This work doesn’t fit the label of fine art; that doesn’t seem to be the intent. But it reminds me of when Abloh launched Off-White… high-end apparel for the streets, made in the same factory as luxury labels… just with a different spirit.

Maybe a model like this should be taken more seriously by those getting threshed by institutions.

It offers a different path for emergent artists; an alternative to a heavily-gatekept, credibility-based model, whereby the hope is to be very famous to very few.

This is a different way entirely to play the game. One that might be a little attention-grabby, a little commercialised, a little bit too much like a joke.

It isn’t the answer. But switch the pieces around a little bit, tread similar beats, and it might be an answer.

I remind myself – in the plays, the most enlightened, the most erudite, often the secretly most powerful person in the story is the Fool. They’re the ones who embrace the absurdity. They’re the ones who know it’s all a game.

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Go further:

https://mschf.com/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90850320/art-collective-mschf-capitalism