Is it a high-flying trick or just another gimmick? British artist Adrian Wilson has created—and sold—what he is calling “the World’s Most Expensive Skateboard:” The $20,000 Supreme Mundi. The deck is made from a wooden artist’s palette and emblazoned with a knockoff of the Supreme skate logo.
Jon Satin, a former art gallery owner, bought the piece on eBay for a client. Wilson asked him who it was, but Satin “gave me the ‘private high end collector’ line,” the artist told artnet News in an email.
Supreme Mundi was inspired in part by the $450 million sale of Salvator Mundi at Christie’s New York in 2017, as well as the phenomenon known as the “drop,” when skateboard fans line up for hours to buy new merchandise from streetwear brands like Supreme. To Wilson, both of these elements were personified by Carson Guo, the 17-year-old from Toronto who recently purchased at auction the complete collection of 248 Supreme skateboard decks for $800,000.
The artist asks viewers to imagine that Supreme Mundi was made from the same palette that conservationist Dianne Dwyer Modestini used in her painstaking restoration of Salvator Mundi. “If this palette was used to fill in the missing parts of the painting,” Wilson said, “it has a direct link to the work of Leonardo da Vinci.”
“In the same way that Christie’s put the Salvator Mundi in a modern art sale alongside a Basquiat, I had to find a way that the palette could appeal to the hipper generation,” he added, noting that Guo “represents the new era of tech fund trustafarian taste-making art collectors, more interested in social media fame than art history.”
Just as Supreme ripped off Barbara Kruger’s signature white-on-red block type, Wilson has now appropriated the brand’s logo for his project, tweaking the lettering to appear in all caps.
Jon Satin collecting the Supreme Mundi from Con Artist Gallery. Photo courtesy of Con Artist Gallery.
During the two-week eBay sale, the skateboard was on view at the New York gallery Con Artist Collective, where it was stored in a specially designed lock box, opened only by request. The skateboard, however, “is fully functional,” Wilson says, and has been ridden on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side.”
“This isn’t just a usable novelty skateboard, this is a commentary on the 500-year artistic and financial hypebubble we are in right now,” Wilson said. “It should really be hanging in the new Brant Trinket Box in the East Village.”
See more photos of Supreme Mundi below.
Adrian Wilson, Supreme Mundi. Photo courtesy of Adrian Wilson.
Jon Satin collecting the Supreme Mundi from Brandon Wisecarver, gallery managing director at Con Artist Gallery. Photo courtesy of Con Artist Gallery.
Adrian Wilson, Supreme Mundi. Photo courtesy of Adrian Wilson.
Jon Satin with Supreme Mundi at Con Artist Gallery. Photo courtesy of Con Artist Gallery.