Porro Origata Bench and Console
Part of what makes traditional Japanese kimonos so distinct, the designer Nao Tamura tells us, is how different they are from traditional Western ways of creating clothes. Made from just a single flat, rectangular roll of fabric that’s then cut into a straight line and sewn together, the craft of making kimonos leaves behind little to no material waste. Representing cleanliness, calmness, and purity, this idea became the genesis behind Tamura’s sophisticated, minimalist Origata bench and console for the Italian home furniture brand Porro, which utilizes the same kimono-making technique to create bold geometric pieces out of aluminum for the home. Rooted in the Japanese words ori (fold) and gata (shape), Tamura says the idea for the Origata first began with her 2020 work on The Tokyo Toilet project, aimed at emphasizing accessibility and comfort in public health in Shibuya City.

Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair
In the annual art fair circuit, New York has long been responsible for producing impactful iterations, many of which—Independent, the Outsider Art Fair, and the Spring/Break Art Show, to name three—have gone on to become institutions in and of themselves. This year, a new player enters the fray: the inaugural Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair, hosted by the nonprofit space Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood from March 27 to 30. In collaboration with Fine Arts Baltimore, the fair will host more than 40 galleries and publisher booths, plus 30 additional tables for “book arts purveyors, individual artists, and academic printmaking departments.” This open approach is reflected in the programming, too: Three booths will be subsidy-supported, to ensure there’s opportunity for equal entry. Praise Shadows Art Gallery, a Boston-based gallery named in reference to Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows—a somewhat frequent citation among our Time Sensitive guests—will exhibit prints from Juan José Barboza Gubo, Crystalle Lacouture, Louise Nevelson, Yuri Shimojō, and Yu-Wen Wu.

Pamela Anderson’s Cooking With Love
In the new series Pamela’s Cooking With Love from Canada’s Flavour Network, actress and activist Pamela Anderson plays the ultimate host—letting her guests take center stage. Expanding upon her plant-based cookbook, I Love You: Recipes From the Heart (Voracious), published last year, Anderson will be inviting eight influential chefs into her home to broaden her cooking skills and bring new influences into her kitchen. In the most recent episode, the chef, recipe creator, and cookbook author Andy Baraghani joins her to cook a dinner party to be enjoyed in her garden. Anderson’s genuine curiosity about food—as well as the incredibly idyllic setting on Vancouver Island in British Columbia—make it a worthwhile addition to a well-covered TV show genre. Although full episodes are not yet available in the U.S., we’re hopeful the show will come to this side of the border soon enough. For now, we’ll be taking what we can from YouTube clips, and looking forward to one day watching Episode 7 with fermentation expert David Zilber (the guest on Ep. 53 of our At a Distance podcast), too.

Six-hundred-and-sixty-six “Satan shoes,” sold with an actual drop of blood; a viral social experiment providing thousands of keys to just one car; a hilariously microscopic Louis Vuitton bag (which sold for an astounding $63,000)—these clever works by aptly named Brooklyn-based outfit MSCHF are intentionally released to subvert and, to a certain extent, parody the very consumerist culture that feeds it. Since its debut in 2016, the group has found comfort and virality in a faceless formula, building an elusive ecosystem of “drops.” Now, with the publication of the group’s first-ever monograph, Made by MSCHF (Phaidon), the art collective is giving a rare look into its creative process, detailing the projects, artists, and operating principles that have come to define it. Here, the book’s authors and MSCHF’s co-chief creative officers, Lukas Bentel and Kevin Wiesner, tell us about their cheeky choice of putting a pair of socks on the cover, their feelings on metrics and “success,” and what they think about making—and breaking—rules.

Tell us about your approach to designing the book.
KEVIN WIESNER: There’s a certain type of artist coffee table book with ninety-nine-percent big, glossy images. We very specifically did not want to make that book. From the outset, our hope was that this could be a chance to talk about the working process and some of the strategies behind these very different projects, from shoes to video games to paintings. There’s an underlying logic to how they all come out of the same practice. That, I think, is one of the most fun parts about MSCHF. It’s also one of the things that’s hardest to see from the outside.

LUKAS BENTEL: I really hope this can be used as sort of a manual, but maybe not explicitly. The first part [of the book] has this internal guide that we made right at the outset of MSCHF with some vague thoughts about how to design the practice. There’s a lot of internal stuff at MSCHF that we’ve never revealed or talked about before that comes through. There’s a lot of work that MSCHF makes where we’re the ones watching the film unfold, and a lot of people don’t get the full story. We were able to document that here.

How did you pick which projects to include?
KW: We basically chose our favorites. There’s a tendency among business, marketing, and advertising types to look at MSCHF and say, “What made the most money? What got the most eyeballs? How do you quantify virality?” That’s never, ever, our internal metric. Sure, we’ve got the Big Red Boots in the book, but we have them in there because I think they’re illuminating in regard to how we think about objects, not because they performed well on Instagram. The selection of these twelve hopefully pushes back against that line of analysis, because it’s never foremost in our minds. We’re selecting for concept at the end of the day.

LB: To that point, the cover of the book has MSCHF wholesale socks on it, which was a secret drop at the time. We were not even pushing it out fully. The story wasn’t about getting the socks to a bunch of people—

KW: It was about getting them to one person. It’s the complete opposite metric. The cover of the book is this callback to a cover-design format that Phaidon used way back in the day for its art history books. This particular one references the typography from a Michelangelo book. We found it hilarious to put a pair of socks into that context and present them in this classic, old-school cover design. I think it’s very appropriate, because those socks represent a specific ironic distance from marketing product. At the time that we were making them, we were trying to poke at all these people who were like, “Oh, I would really love to just buy a T-shirt that says MSCHF.” We’re not gonna make a T-shirt. We’ll make socks, because that’s a really stupid product, and then we’ll only allow one person to buy them. For us, the socks are shorthand for nagging commodities. It makes them well-suited for the cover of this big, expensive coffee table book.What was it like to share your behind-the-scenes process in such an intimate way?

KW: At the end of the day, we make these things for us. That is the ultimate criteria for creative work in general, but we also get to experience them in a way that no one else does. We’re making objects or systems or interactions that are a stage. They’re props, and they provoke unorthodox behaviors among a relatively large audience. Usually, when in that kind of structure, the most interesting things that happen are not designed and planned by us. They arise from that audience and how it engages with either the work or each other. That can be relatively difficult to see if you are peripherally hearing about the Key4All car because you saw an article about it. We’re sitting on the inside, and we’re watching all the TikToks that are made about it. That’s a vantage point we really wanted to share. 

LB: I hope a lot of people can look at our brand book, read it, and run with these rules and make things. I always get excited when people are making things.

You mentioned rules. I’m curious how your relationship to rules informs the work.
LB: Not to run back to the KLF book [The Manual], but their book had a refund policy where, if you followed all the rules in their book and documented it and did not have a number one hit single, you could get refunded the cost of the book within a certain window. That was interesting to us, because I think they realized that they were making work within a certain period of time, and the rules in that period of time changed. Even before MSCHF, when we were working on other projects, the rules of the game were completely different. The media landscape was incredibly different. Social media was incredibly different. The way you would make things online was very, very different. You can’t expect the rules that we’re talking about right now to work in five years.

Some of the essay writers featured in the book describe MSCHF ideas as “Jesus-like” or as “the new Robin Hood.” One calls the collective a “bunch of cheats and thieves.” What’s it like to have those descriptors associated with your work and your ideas?
KW: Those all sound great to me! [Laughs]

LB: Some of the people who were writing the essays are our literal heroes, specifically Maurizio Cattelan and Lauren Boyle and Sean Monahan. Those three were people I looked up to so heavily when we were coming up. It’s an honor for them to have even agreed to write anything.

What kind of creativity do you hope this book will spark in others?
LB: A lot of the work was designed with the full life cycle of the project in mind, from, “How does it get into the world?” and “How does it exist?” to “How does it die?” I hope people start just thinking holistically about making things. There are a lot of people making shit right now, and it’s just content at the end of the day. It’s very quick. It lasts for one second. It doesn’t have this full life. We’re looking to make things that have longer narratives and aren’t constantly caught up in this crazy rat race. Even though a lot of the work that we make does have a very good life on social platforms, none of it was designed for those spaces. It was actually very specifically not designed for those spaces. If people can take that lesson away, we’ll be left with more work that we can look back at and feel really proud of as a group of humans. 

This interview was conducted by Kylie McConville. It has been condensed and edited.