People have struggled to wrap their heads around what Mschf is ever since it orchestrated its first moment of internet virality in 2019. While the Brooklyn-born group has been described as everything from “a very modern … business?” to “Banksy for the internet”, its shape-shifting brand of nihilism means it will inevitably be interpreted in different ways, depending on your entry point to its work.

“We call it an art collective, and we’ve fallen into that term, honestly,” says chief creative officer Kevin Wiesner, who is also one of its original founders. “The nice thing about ‘art collective’ is nobody really knows what that means, so it’s an excellent catch-all. It also means that when we think about outputs, Mschf the entity is the author of those works. From the outset we were like, ‘Can we make a company that is an artist?’ And it is consciously operating as a company.”

Over the last half a decade, the collective’s fortnightly ‘drops’ (read: subversive commentaries on modern culture) have ranged from Severed Spots (2020), which saw individual spots from a $30,000 Damien Hirst piece cut out and resold for $480 each; Key4All (2022), which allowed 5,000 people to buy a key to share a single car, as long as they could find it in New York City; and the now infamous Big Red Boots (2023), which racked up 100,000 orders on the day of their release, were worn by hordes of celebs and influencers and generated endless memes and discussion online.