MSCHF
Bigger Blur, 2021
On view at Phillips New York through January 2022
About Bigger Blur
Bigger Blur, 2021, is the latest in MSCHF’s “Blur” series. In late 2020, MSCHF released an ecommerce performance art piece called “Blur.” While something was offered for sale, the object appeared to be blurred out. Only purchasing and receiving the work would “reveal” what it actually was.
Upon receipt, however, buyers discovered that the object was exactly as advertised – a solid brick that appears to be a stack of bills, blurred on all faces. What looked like a blurred photo was in fact an unblurred image of a blurry 3D object.
“Blur” interrogates our desire to read value into an object, and the tantalization of the unknown. Purchasing an art object is a trade of the brutally functional for the beautifully abstract: money for ...something! “Blur” visualizes this transaction – the blurred block made to look like an unknown object-in-potentia – and then subverts it by delivering exactly that representation of potential, still unresolved.
About MSCHF
MSCHF is an American art collective that engages art, fashion, tech, and capitalism. The collective subverts mass/popular culture and corporate operations as tools for critique and intervention. MSCHF makes artworks that live directly in the systems they critique, instead of hiding inside insular institutions. By collapsing the distance of critical remove, MSCHF deliberately conflates the critique space with the critiqued space. There is no better way to start a conversation about consumer culture than by participating in consumer culture. MSCHF chooses specific mediums to engage with specific subject material: they make shoes, stream video, publish books, create paintings, sculptures, apps and web services – everything in service to the concept. MSCHF is fully context chameleonic.