Grimes is selling her soul to the highest bidder

Most new parents spend the weeks after their child’s birth doting on the little bundle of joy, or at the very least, learning how to keep a tiny human alive. But Grimes and Elon Musk aren’t most people. He’s busy launching astronauts into space from US soil for the first time in almost a decade (as well as tweeting MRA dog whistles). While she’s busy selling her soul to the highest bidder.

Don’t worry, the soul-selling stuff, anyway, is all part of an elaborate art project. Grimes is opening her first ever fine art show this week, with simultaneous online exhibitions through Gallery Platform Los Angeles (from May 28 through June 3) and Maccarone Los Angeles (from May 28 through August 31). The show, titled Selling Out, includes drawings, prints, photographs and conceptual art pieces she’s created over the last decade.

“I see myself as a visual artist first and foremost, and I’ve always felt strange that people know me for music,” Grimes told Bloomberg.

Actions like selling her soul are reflections on her life in the limelight. Especially after coupling with Musk in 2018, everyone on Earth seemed to have an opinion about how she ought to live her life. Also titled Selling Out, the piece consists of a legal document by which the purchaser acquires a percentage of Grimes’s soul. Did she already give a bit of it away for free to Elon? You decide.

“I didn’t want anyone to buy it, so I said we should just make it $10 million and then it probably won’t sell,” Grimes told Bloomberg. But when her lawyer drafted a contract for the sale, “the deeper we got with it, the more philosophically interesting it became. Also, I really wanted to collaborate with my lawyer on art. The idea of fantastical art in the form of legal documents just seems very intriguing to me,” Grimes said.

But when the coronavirus pandemic sent the world on a path towards recession, Grimes reconsidered the implications of valuing her soul at such an exorbitant sum. “With the current state of the world, do you want to put something up for $10 million?” she rhetorically asked. Grimes’s soul is now listed as “best offer,” and it’ll be up to the market to decide her value.