IT WAS A slow Saturday on the second-to-last afternoon of this past December’s Art Miami, one of the city’s longest-running art fairs, now eclipsed by the much flashier Art Basel Miami Beach. Ethan Cohen, a dealer with a gallery on West 17th Street in Manhattan, was sitting in his booth showing a sculpture by the Rhode Island-based artist Thomas Deininger called “Macawll of the Wild” (2024). From head-on, the work appears as a realistic depiction of a blue-and-yellow macaw perched on a branch. But the piece changes as the viewer moves around it, revealing itself to be a perspectival trick — from the side, it’s not a sculpture of a macaw at all but a seemingly random cluster of cheap found objects: unclothed dolls, a plastic palm tree, an action figure of Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” On closer inspection, the bird’s tail is made of an unpeeled plastic banana, an orange bottle cap, a No. 2 pencil and a tangled tape measure, among other things. It was priced at $60,000, but Cohen had yet to sell it when a woman came by and shot a video of the piece.
By the next morning, Cohen had numerous messages from people he hadn’t heard from in a long time — a former assistant, an intern who’d worked for him a decade ago, a collector in Indonesia. The woman had posted the video on her TikTok account, @gabrielleeeruth, and “somehow,” he told me, it “tripped the algorithm.” Not only did the work quickly find a buyer but there were now hundreds of spectators at the booth, leaning over one another to shoot their own videos, so many that Cohen had to find somebody to handle crowd control to protect the art. It wasn’t until his son, who’s in his early 30s, suggested that Cohen check TikTok himself that he truly understood the magnitude of what was going on: The original video already had 16 million views by around noon on Sunday. By 3:30 p.m. it was up to 50 million. At 6 p.m., the fair was over and the video had 90 million views. The tally, as of this writing, is 118 million and counting.
Thomas Deininger’s sculpture “Macawll of the Wild” (2024), which went viral after appearing on TikTok in December.
