The artwork collective often known as MSCHF isn’t any stranger to provocation. The group has questioned the worth of artwork itself, making copies of items by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, promoting forgeries and the originals as presumably genuine objects. It has shined a lightweight on wealth disparity by way of an ATM that ranks customers’ account balances. It has been sued by Nike and criticised by animal rights teams for making sneakers that include human blood. However whereas prior to now MSCHF has balanced controversy and creative advantage to various levels, its newest scheme missed the mark. Referred to as Our Cow Angus, the challenge was imagined as a sort of social experiment to lift consciousness of animal rights points, however as an alternative shed a lightweight on the polarising nature of public discourse.
MSCHF started Our Cow Angus two years in the past when it bought a cow and pre-sold it as tokens representing 1,200 hamburgers and 4 leather-based luggage to be made when the animal reached slaughtering age. Consumers may save Angus’s life by returning their tokens by way of a “regret portal”. If 50% of tokens have been returned by the top of the day as we speak (13 March), Angus would dwell the remainder of his life on an animal sanctuary.
“The challenge got down to create a microcosm alternate actuality which made retroactive shopper selection effectual,” Kevin Wiesner, a co-founder of MSCHF, tells The Artwork Newspaper. Consumers may additionally resell their tokens, permitting any involved individual to purchase shares to avoid wasting Angus on the secondary market, although at a considerably inflated value.
After vital returns during the last 48 hours, the challenge handed the 50% threshold on Friday afternoon. Angus is now not heading to the slaughterhouse.
Regardless that his life was spared, it’s exhausting to not view Our Cow Angus as a failure. The experiment didn’t spark significant conversations on animal rights or the meals and style industries. A lot of the general public discourse occurred over platforms like Instagram, Discord and Reddit, the place feedback have been polarising. There have been some significant remarks, together with issues about hinging an animal’s life on an artwork challenge, in addition to broader factors in regards to the dialogue over Angus as a microcosm for discourse extra globally. However sadly, the engagement by way of these retailers (significantly Discord and Reddit, the place customers favour anonymity) led to a barrage of inflammatory quips and insensitive memes supposed to impress additional division. For a challenge that aimed to slim the hole between consumers and the merchandise they eat, the precise end result worsened the gap, flattening mental dialogue.
The MSCHF collective is much from the one artist to make use of residing animals in an artwork challenge. In 2000, the Chilean artist Marco Evaristti unveiled Helena, a disturbing set up of blenders, every containing a goldfish susceptible to any customer who wished to show the machine on—resulting in the deaths of at the least two fish. The artist staged an equally despicable set up in 2025, leaving three piglets to starve to dying in a cage (they have been fortunately rescued by an animal rights group). In 2014, the Aspen Artwork Museum got here below hearth for exhibiting tortoises with iPads connected to their shells, which wandered across the museum’s rooftop as a part of Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition Shifting Ghost City. And in 2017, three items in Artwork and China After 1989: Theater of the World on the Guggenheim have been eliminated on account of their use of animals, together with Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993), which options dwell reptiles and bugs.
The design for the purses that 4 consumers would have obtained if MSCHF’s challenge Our Cow Angus (2024-26) had turned out in another way Courtesy MSCHF
In these earlier circumstances, artists introduced the animals into the house of the gallery (and in some situations deliberately put them in hurt’s method), confronting guests with a tangible reminder of the life getting used as a spectacle. In MSCHF’s challenge, the conceptual distance might have been too extensive.
For its half, MSCHF has been sending consumers pictures of Angus, updates on the standing of his rescue and hyperlinks to the Regret Portal. “Except for sharing some audience-made content material particularly in regards to the intersection of meat/local weather/deforestation, our communications to consumers have been restricted to documenting Angus particularly, albeit with some anthropomorphism and pathos,” Wiesner says.
Updates have additionally been shared periodically on the challenge’s web site, and MSCHF has supplied the occasional reminder of how one can save Angus on its social media platforms, together with info earlier this week on how one can purchase tokens on the secondary market after which return them. Paradoxically, this specific put up was shared the identical day that MSCHF marketed its newest leather-based purses on the market, merchandise unrelated to Angus.
Whether or not social media commenters even personal an Angus token is unclear. When requested what the challenge achieved, a consultant for MSCHF stated: “It has generated an ecosystem round Angus bigger than simply the consumers and sellers and burger and bag tokens—bigger, I believe, than we anticipated. We’ve met folks around the globe who’ve adopted the lifetime of this cow.”
As a conceptual challenge that lives on-line, Our Cow Angus didn’t a lot reveal the perils of the agriculture and style industries because it confirmed the pitfalls of a type of public debate now dominated by anonymity, rage-baiting and dichotomy.
