“Like GTA in real life”: How MSCHF became the most provocative art collective around

Few contemporary art collectives have managed to command as many online column inches over the last few years as Brooklyn-based MSCHF. From Office Chair Simulator to Cease and Desist Grand Prix, the team is currently responsible for over 100 project, or ‘drops’, each more provocative and irreverent than the last.

Founded in 2016 by Gabriel Whaley, the group now has over 20 employees, and has become increasingly ambitious with its work – which, while often funny, always maintains a bedrock of social and cultural commentary. We caught up with four members of the collective at Stockholm’s Spritmuseum, where MSCHF’s work is featured in a brand new Andy Warhol exhibition, titled Money on the Wall.

One of the most famous MSCHF projects is 2022’s ‘Key4All‘, which saw the group sell 1,000 keys, all of which unlocked the same car. “We took a 2004 PT Cruiser and connected 1000 car keys to it, and we sold those car keys for $18 apiece, and people throughout all 50 states purchased them,” MSCHF’s Hope Harrison tells Creative Bloq “And then we released the car, like GTA in real life.”

The project ended up taking on a life of its own. “It was really successful, Harrison adds. “We released it in Brooklyn. It made it all the way to California before it got impounded from being left in a snowstorm. You could drive the car, you could steal it from other people. Other people could steal it from you. It was a huge social experiment. It was amazing to see such a community built around it, such a lot of people rallying around a shared object, instead of witnessing a tragedy of the commons sort of situation.”

That community aspect, which sometimes emerges unexpectedly, is at the heart of MSCHF’s work. Even a much smaller scale drop, such as Office Chair Simulator, can turn out to unite fans. “That game was all about sitting in chairs,” MSCHF’s Kevin Weisner tells us. “But before long there was a speed-running group, and websites devoted to tracking speed-run times, which introduced this strange, little competitive layer on top of a game that, in our mind, had no multiplayer component to it at all. And people even found exploits and ways to break the game so that you could clip your character through walls to complete it faster.”

Key4Life and Office Chair Simulator are typical of MSCHF’s drops in that its embracing of unpredictability – and humour. But how important is comedy to the collective’s output? “A lot of the commentary that we make has an element of satire or parody,” Harrison says, and I think generally in our own process, we find a lot of humour in the world around us, in social trends or cultural trends, or even like economic trends and like throwing our own spin on it.”

While each of the groups 100+ ‘drops’ are nothing if not unique, does the group see them adding up to a single work of art? “It probably varies person to person,” Harrison says, “But I think most of us see things as separate projects, and the thing uniting them is the fact that the collective made them, making them part of a single performance piece that is the existence of our collective. I think we use the variability of the drops to make distinct commentary, all under the umbrella of our group’s perspective”.

Several examples of MSCHF’s work can currently be viewed at Money on the Wall in Stockholm’s Spritmuseum. The exhibition also features a long-lost painting of an Absolut Vodka bottle, which we discussed with the brand’s VP of marketing last month.