A British artist has sold his parody skateboard for a jaw-dropping sum – and it’s got someone else’s logo on it.
Supreme is infamous for their prolific branding. From skateboards and clothes to bricks, crow bars and even crop circles, their logo is just about everywhere. And now it’s plastered on the above skateboard/artwork by Adrian Wilson. However, despite being a working skateboard, it is no ordinary deck. Instead it is an artist’s palette fitted with trucks, wheels and a heckin ton of symbolism.
“This isn’t just a usable novelty skateboard. This is a commentary on the 500 year wide artistic and financial hypebubble we are in right now.”
–– Adrian Wilson
But Why Though?
Not only does Wilson take issue with Supreme’s branding style, he seems to trace this problem back to the Renaissance. The piece is entitled Supreme Mundi, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi which, speaking of hefty sums, sold for $450 million. In comparison, Supreme has managed to flog a collection of skateboard decks to Canadian teenager Carson Guo for $800,000. Wilson, in his artistic statement, talks about a ‘500 year wide…hypebubble’, thus linking Supreme’s marketing to da Vinci and his posthumous sales.
Whether or not you can see the logic behind this leap, the ability to sell a scrap of wood and four wheels with a logo slapped on it for $20,000 is pretty admirable. Although that’s probably the point Wilson was trying to make in the end: branding is everything these days. Even so, he takes a pretty bleak look at this outcome. Wilson believes that his ability to make such a huge profit off of Supreme Mundi “represents the new era of tech fund trustafarian tastemaking art collectors, more interested in social media fame than art history.”
If skateboarding is your thing and you’d like to see more of that (plus some paranormal junk) then check this out.
