MSCHF is back with another audacious swing at the art market, and this time, they’re taking a scalpel to ownership itself. To be unveiled on July 10 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, King Solomon’s Baby is a single foam sculpture priced at $100,000, but only if one person buys it. If two or more buyers step in, the work will be literally cut and split into as many pieces as there are participants, with the price adjusting accordingly. Each person walks away with a fraction of the baby.
ART
This is no metaphor. The artwork is built to be dismembered. Two buyers get half a sculpture each for $50,000. Three buyers get thirds. The maximum? 1,000 people, each paying $100 for 1/1000th of the foam form. It’s a playfully brutal echo of the biblical story of King Solomon and the child caught in a custody dispute, except in this version, there’s no wise king to intervene, only buyers willing to gamble on collective value.
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MSCHF’s approach turns the act of purchasing into a performance of trust, speculation, and shared risk. The collective calls it a “financial trust fall,” banking on buyers’ fear of being the only one in. The more people join, the less each pays, but also the more fragmented the sculpture becomes. Ownership becomes literal division.
This isn’t MSCHF’s first foray into art-world disruption. Their ATM Leaderboard at Art Basel Miami, which displayed the bank balances of users, or their slicing of a Damien Hirst painting into individually sold dots, speak to their ongoing critique of how value, spectacle, and scarcity play out in both art and commerce. King Solomon’s Baby sharpens that conversation into one clean conceptual cut.
Sales go live on kingsolomonsbaby.com at 2PM EDT, with a public reception to follow at Pioneer Works from 7–9PM. The ceremonial first slice happens at 8:30PM, kicking off a two-day durational performance where the sculpture will be divided based on final buyer count. The process will be livestreamed and viewable onsite, culminating in the artwork’s fragmented form being displayed through Pioneer Works’ Second Sunday event.
Functioning simultaneously as a sculpture, an experiment, and a satire, King Solomon’s Baby continues MSCHF’s mission to make the art market a little messier, a little funnier, and a lot harder to take too seriously. The question isn’t just who owns the art, but how much of it they’re willing to lose to say they do.
