If you’re conversant in Brooklyn art-stunt collective MSCHF, then you understand of their penchant cultural pranks and subversions. Take final month’s “derelict strip mall” present containing a life-size marble sculpture of Jennifer Lopez based mostly on paparazzi pictures and 24kGoldn’s fist-bump wall. You may additionally keep in mind Lil Nas X’s notorious customized Satan sneakers. Anyhow, throughout Art Basel in Miami Beach this week, MSCHF outdid themselves with an “ATM Leaderboard” that challenged attendees to disclose their financial institution balances, which the machine then ranked.
Indeed, the “ATM Leaderboard” is a literal working ATM that shows the money balances of Art Basel attendees together with pictures captured by the ATM’s digicam. Then, customers’ balances are ranked, fairly like a video arcade recreation. As for who has the best financial institution stability? That’d be Diplo, who posted his rating — round $3M — in a video on his Instagram with the caption, “I just won art basel.”
“‘ATM Leaderboard’ is an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses,” MSCHF co-founder Daniel Greenberg instructed CNN. “From its conception, we had mentally earmarked this work for a location like Miami Basel, a place where there is a dense concentration of people renting Lamborghinis and wearing Rolexes. These are analogous implicit gestures to the ATM Leaderboard’s explicit one.”
Watch Diplo “win” Art Basel beneath.