Salva Mubarak Senior Features Writer

How far would you go to flaunt your wealth? This is the question Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF is asking with their display at Art Basel Miami beach 2022.

The group, in collaboration with the French art gallery Perrotin, has installed a functioning ATM at the art festival that displays the bank balance of the user, ranked in the form of a leaderboard. The art installation is appropriately titled ‘ATM Leaderboard’.

MSCHF’s founder Daniel Greenberg spoke to NPR and said, “ATM Leaderboard is an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses. 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.”

In case you didn’t know, Art Basel is an international art fair that is hosted in different locations around the world, including Switzerland, Hong Kong, Paris, and Miami Beach.

Every year, the art community converges for a week of exhibitions, music festivals, and lavish parties. The event is attended by the who’s who of the art world and celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, and Hailey Bieber were also spotted there.

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While most of the rich folks who attended the exhibition refrained from using the ATM, for obvious reasons, music producer and DJ, Diplo, shared a video of himself using the ATM and ‘winning’ the top spot at the leaderboard with his over $3 million bank balance.

However, he was knocked down to the third rank, with a user boasting $9 million in their bank replacing him at the top.

MSCHF has been known to create disruptive artworks and fashion items, like the satanic sneakers they designed for rapper Lil Nas X which were Nike sneakers but with a few additional blood drops. Nike later sued the art collective for selling the shoes. The group was also responsible for the contentious Fenty Beauty lip gloss set that resembled ketchup packets, with some actually being ketchup instead of red-tinted gloss!

‘ATM Leaderboard’ was sold to an anonymous buyer for $75,000 and now it’s up to the buyer to decide where it will prop up next.

What do you think of the ‘ATM Leaderboard’?