Art Basel: ATM at culture fair displays users’ bank balances on a leaderboard

Current ‘highest scorer’ on leaderboard has a bank balance of $2.9m (£2.44m)

An ATM at Art Basel displays the bank balance of anyone who uses it before ranking them in order of wealth.

The annual art fair is currently taking place in Miami Beach, Florida, which sees collectors, galleries and artists coming together from around the world to appreciate new forms of visual art.

One of the pieces attracting a lot of attention this year comes from Brooklyn art collective MSCHF, who have shared their latest work, ATM Leaderboard.

Quite literally, the piece is a working cash machine that publicly displays the balances of anyone who uses it.

Then, the users are ranked in order of how much money they have, with photos captured by the ATM's camera.

Daniel Greenberg, co-founder of MSCHF, has explained the meaning behind the piece as a way of challenging people’s impulses to show off how much they are materially worth.

“ATM Leaderboard is an extremely literal distillation of wealth-flaunting impulses,” he 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.”

At the time of writing, the “highest scorer” on the leaderboard is someone who has a balance of $2.9m (£2.44m).

Greenberg added that after Art Basel, ATM Leaderboard could very well appear elsewhere.

“Because of the camera, the ATM keeps a continuous record of each person who uses it and also each location that it is installed, so we hope that it will have an opportunity to move through more spaces,” Greenberg explained.

On social media, people have reacted with intrigue about how they might use the information provided on the leaderboard.

“This is a great set up to find a sugar daddy lmaoooo,” one viewer joked.