If you’ve ever stood before a hulking sculpture and thought, “I wish I could take just a sliver of that home,” MSCHF has you covered. The Brooklyn-based collective—best known the ATM at Art Basel Miami Beach that had monied art fair fans jockeying for position, selling a Damien Hirst painting one dot at a time, and the Big Red Boot that went viral in 2023—is back with King Solomon’s Baby, a sculpture that’s built to be dismembered.
Billed as a “financial trust fall,” the project invites early collectors to take the plunge, hoping others will follow suit in a reverse pyramid scheme that’s artfully self-aware. Sales go live on kingsolomonsbaby.com at 2 p.m. on Thursday, just in time for an opening night fête from 7–9 p.m. at Pioneer Works.
The baby on its own goes for $100,000. Two buyers means $50,000 each and so on until 1000 people are interested, in which case the child gets split 1000 times at $100 a piece. I guess that’s a firm good bye to the Brooklyn dollar slice.
The show continues in public view on Friday and Saturday (July 11–12) from noon to 6 p.m. at the same location. What you’ll find: a large-scale sculpture that’s destined for disassembly. To say, it’s being cut up with a hot wire jig, sold off, and distributed in thin slices until what once stood as a “monumental” work becomes a thousand wall-ready paintings. The fully deconstructed sculpture will be on view on July 13.
Per one reading, the sculpture turns aura into asset, spectacle into commerce, and collective memory into flat-pack wall décor. Interested parties don’t even get to choose what slice of the big baby you get—according to the web site, each buyer gets a random slice of the polystyrene foam and paint cutie pie.
Can’t make it to Brooklyn? That’s kind of the point. “The number of people who have seen the Gelitin rabbit as a photograph online dwarfs the number who have seen it in person, surely by several orders of magnitude,” says the project’s manifesto.
“The camera is the blade that cuts the thinnest possible slice,” it adds.
