Cheesy art anyone? France’s best-loved cheese spread La vache que rit (The Laughing Cow) has had a conceptual makeover. The Fromageries Bel, which has been producing it since 1921, has commissioned German  artist Hans Peter Feldmann to design a limited edition collectable box.

Feldmann’s intervention is very much in line with the artist’s tongue-in-cheek approach to art making. He simply added a red nose to the iconic logo, as he did in some of this best-known artworks, adding red noses to found paintings and even banknotes.

“I didn’t want to make my box synonymous with an art that nobody could understand,” Feldmann commented. “I wanted to create something that didn’t look out of place in the aisles next to the regular boxes but at the same time, I wanted it to be more appealing to the eye.”

The Feldmann-designed packaging is the first of a planned series of collaborations with major contemporary artists conceived by Lab’Bel, the artistic branch of the Bel Group. It will run until the brand’s 100th anniversary in 2021.

“Feldmann is a phenomenon, a genuinely atypical artist who deliberately ignores the rules of the art market,” said the project’s curator Michael Staab. “He refuses to sign his works or to limit his prints, which nevertheless does not prevent his works from achieving very high prices.”

75,000 copies of Feldmann’s Laughing Cow box are to be produced, they retail for €2,69 on average.

“Art doesn’t really happen in museums but in real life, where the most people discover their art,” continued Feldmann. “The art in museums is a little stale and a little in the past … To find something in a supermarket which makes you smile or which makes you think, is in my view far more [artistic] than hanging a picture in the Louvre.”