An Art Collective Bought a $30,000 Damien Hirst Spot Print and Cut It Up. Now, They’re Selling the Spots for $480 a Pop

The offbeat brand-cum-art
collective known as MSCHF is cutting up a Damien Hirst work and
putting it up for auction as an act of protest against investors
who buy fractions of pricy artworks.

The Brooklyn-based artists and
designers behind MSCHF purchased a $30,000 Damien Hirst spot print and
cut out all 88 of its dots. Starting today, they’re selling the dots for $480
each. Meanwhile,
the original print, now
just a piece of paper with 88 holes and Hirst’s signature, is up
for auction for a minimum of $126,500.

“The key to runaway art world
success is: merchandising!” reads the manifesto for the
project, titled
Severed Spots. “Who wants to make one-offs when the market
has so much appetite? But let’s take it a step further—maybe we
don’t need more zombie wallworks, we just need to distribute the
ones we’ve got!” 

Founded in 2016, MSCHF launched
its first project last year when it auctioned off a
computer infected with
six of the world’s most malicious viruses for $1.3 million. After
that came a number of news-making stunts that straddled the lines
of conceptual art, contemporary design, and internet gaggery:
a squeaking bong
shaped like a rubber chicken, a messaging system that texts you
AI-generated pictures of feet, and an app that lets you
watch Netflix at work by
making it look like you’re on a conference call.

Perhaps the most infamous of the
bunch, though, is “Jesus
Shoes”—a series of
custom Nike Air Max 97s with holy water from the River Jordan in
the soles. They went for $1,425 per pair. 

“The cool thing that we have
going for us is we set this precedent that we’re not tied to a
category or vertical,” MSCHF’s chief executive, Gabriel Whaley,
told the New York
Times in a profile
earlier this year. “We did the Jesus shoes and everyone knows us
for that, and then we shut it down. We will never do it again.
People are like, ‘Wait, why wouldn’t you double down on that, you
would have made so much money!’ But that’s not why we’re
here.”

The group issues new drops every
two weeks, and they’re anticipated and puzzled over with feverish
fandom. Apparently there’s good money in it too: The company has
raised more than $11.5 million in outside investments since the
fall of 2019, according to the Times.

The post An Art Collective Bought a $30,000 Damien Hirst
Spot Print and Cut It Up. Now, They’re Selling the Spots for $480 a
Pop appeared first on artnet News.