The collective has spared the titular animal of Our Cow Angus from being turned into hamburgers and handbags. What kind of a stunt is this?
Angus the cow has avoided the farm in the sky – just. Two years ago, on 14 March 2024, infamous culture collective MSCHF bought a ‘handsome male cow’ from an Upstate New York farm, ear-tagged him with the MSCHF logo and named him Angus. He became the unwitting main character of their new project Our Cow Angus – revealed in August 2024 – which invited the brand’s fans to preorder a three-pack of burgers ($35) ground from his flesh or a crossbody leather bag ($1,200) crafted from thongs of his hide. Every buyer was also sent an Angus Token, which allowed them to access a ‘Remorse Portal’ and cancel their preorder without refund. If 50 percent of tokens were sacrificed ahead of the two-year-mark, Angus would live and be packed off to a farm, with no beefy bounty for anyone. With ten hours to go, on Friday 13 March, Angus was saved.
The project offered an intriguing ultimatum. It played on the pop-cultural allure of the dead cow, a tragicomic symbol of excessive opulence, climate nihilism and hypercapitalism: bullfighting, steak frites, alien probing, calfskin loafers. It was Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde cow, but here the viewer had the power to revive it. It was the UnHappy Meal of McDonaldisation. And it seemed to make us all complicit. ‘Our Cow Angus fulfills the fantasy of market mechanisms for social change,’ reads the MSCHF spiel. But while the stakes were high, the setup failed. Our Cow Angus felt stunted and lacking in gravitas. And his salvation wasn’t at all euphoric.
Of course, for vegan aesthetes (like myself, I should disclaim), this could be deemed a moot point. Are we forgetting how sick it is to potentially kill a sentient being for the purpose of entertainment, turning a cow into commerce? But that’s exactly the reaction MSCHF wanted. Our ethical outrage becomes immediately flawed, because we’re not mourning the 899,999 other cows that were killed on Saturday across the world. What’s so bad, MSCHF makers may say, about another cow going through the mincer for some form of pleasure – if not for food, why not for art? In this sense, perhaps, the project could have been a comment on our selective grief; if we care about Angus, you’d better also care about all his bovine counterparts across the globe.
The issue is, this potentially powerful gotcha moment was lost. For all its assumed viral potential, the outrage was limited, bar a statement from PETA encouraging MSCHF to stick to ‘animal-free antics for any future attempts to shock the public’. Angus wasn’t going to become the Harambe of the artworld, nor was he going to stop anyone wearing Miista mules or downing bone broth. And there’s (probably) not going to be a mass We Saved Angus celebration.
It’s partly down to a lack of storytelling. In order for us to care about Angus’s fate, we had to invest in him as a character, psychologically as well as financially. We had to stare that damn cow in its gorgeous saucer eyes and see into its soul. In The Matrix (1999), Cypher doesn’t care that his steak isn’t real. The simulation tastes just as juicy. For Our Cow Angus, we needed to be reminded that he really was alive and mooing, making MSCHF’s macabre thought-experiment as gruelling as possible.
But the Our Cow Angus website, a poppy, post-internet portal featuring a live tracker and a slew of ironic infographics, didn’t give stakeholders the specifics on Angus. ‘For the remainder of his two-year-lifespan, diary entries, letters and photos will be added continuously,’ promised the ‘Angus’ Dairy’ [sic] section. In the end, we got 15 low-lift updates across the 104 weeks, with the last update coming on 24 July 2025. On Instagram, after a first post about Angus in August 2024, there were 48 subsequent posts about other projects (a Phaidon book, chunky loafers, a Hot Wheels collaboration, Marlboro-inspired tees, a bedroom in Seoul) before another post about him surfaced more than a year later in December 2025. Was Angus in hiding? It’s worlds apart from Andrea Arnold’s quietly magical Cow, following the life of a single dairy cow across a 94-minute runtime, leading up to her miserable death. By that point, you know the exact idiosyncrasies of the cow’s mannerisms, making the threat of its demise far more harrowing.
It’s also difficult to buy into the idea that every Angus Token holder held power. ‘Angus manifests a dream where individual actions demonstrably matter,’ MSCHF originally said. In the small-ish print, it notes that the 400 buyers of the Burger three-pack get a ‘1x voting share’ compared to the ‘100x voting share’ for the four buyers of the Angus Bag. In the end, it only took 100 of the burger buyers and three of the bag buyers to hit the 50 percent mark. The tokens were also allowed to be resold on StockX, meaning that original buyers weren’t necessarily responsible (and, hypothetically, MSCHF could have bought them back).
The project seems to reflect MSCHF’s current frenetic attention span. Of course, to make art that comments on late capitalism, you have to work within its insidious systems. But now the group appears to operate more like a souped-up Supreme: last summer, they launched Applied MSCHF, a white-label studio and brand agency; meanwhile, former fans have accused the collective of ditching their consumerist commentary for cheap cash grabs. If the point of Our Cow Angus was to bring an arbitrary animal to life, and to show us that we would all be complicit in its meaningful death, the project flopped. Most of us, including, it seems, MSCHF themselves, basically forgot the cow existed. Rather than flesh out Angus’s story, MSCHF neglected the creature.
The defence here is that it’s actually all postironic and there’s nothing more radical than making anti-capitalist animal lovers frantically buy tokens on StockX to save a random calf. But the saving of Angus doesn’t seem like the commentary on ‘Conscious Consumerism’ that MSCHF promised. He’s just a sad cash cow.
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