If you’re the kind of person who likes to show off their wealth, head over to Art Basel Miami Beach and use their unique ATM machine to have your account balance featured on its leaderboard for everyone to see.
Developed by New York-based art collective MSCHF in collaboration with Perrotin Gallery, ATM Leaderboard is an artistic project inspired that, just as its name suggests, displays the cash balances of anyone who uses it like the high scores of a classic arcade game, depending on the size of their bank accounts. It was inspired by the wealth-flaunting trends of modern influencers who use their apparent wealth for fame and social media followers.
Photo: Jan Antonin Kolar/Unsplash
“‘ATM Leaderboard’ is an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses,” Daniel Greenberg, co-founder of MSCHF, told CNN. “From its conception, we had mentally earmarked this work for a location like Miami Basel, a place where there is a dense concentration of people renting Lamborghinis and wearing Rolexes. These are analogous implicit gestures to the ATM Leaderboard’s explicit one.”
To create the unique device, MSCHF took a functional ATM machine and fitted it with a digital leaderboard and a camera. When someone inserts their debit card and inputs in their pin code, the camera takes a picture as the account balance flashes on the screen along with a dedicated animation for low funds and another for impressive sums. For example, one ARTnews journalist claims she got “an animation of a toilet stuffed with money popped up with big blue letters telling me ‘BYE!'”.
Those brave enough to use the ATM Leaderboard at Art Basel Miami Beach should know that their faces and account balances will remain in the machine’s memory as it makes subsequent appearances at other art shows in the future, so use it at your own risk.
When not in use, the ATM Leaderboard constantly shows photos of users and their bank accounts, but according to MSCHF artist Liz Ryan, there aren’t as many users as the creators of the project anticipated. Apparently, the general public isn’t that eager to show off their wealth.
“It’s really interesting, because whether or not people end up putting their card in, everyone has their moment with it,” Ryan said. “You can see them going through this introspective pause where they’re asking themselves if they can go through with it.”
“We figured, people would be really flashy, want to show off, but that hasn’t totally been the case,” MSCHF creative officer Kevin Weisner said. “And, it’s been a bit underutilized so far.”
In case you were curious, according to most online sources we’ve checked, the most ‘well endowed’ user of the ATM Leaderboard was a bearded man in a pink t-shirt with a bank account balance of over $2.9 million. But the machine was only installed on December 1st, so the rankings could change.
If the name MSCHF sounds familiar, it might be because this is the art collective behind other controversial artworks, such as this pair of sneakers infused with holy water, or the “satan shoes” made with a drop of human blood.
