Calling Elon Musk: This 30-pound marble MAGA hat costs $48,000

Sculptor Robin Antar says she has spent her entire artistic practice on a mission to create a record of the cultural and personal events that have impacted her life. Case in point: this 30-pound MAGA baseball cap made of white marble that Antar is now selling for $48,000.

Despite its relevance, the 7x10x14-inch sculpture wasn’t made duriing this election cycle. It was the first piece of Antar’s ongoing ‘What’s going on in America now’ series, which represents America’s current political environment. The collection also includes a pair of boxing gloves and the U.S. Constitution in a knot, carved out of the same Carrara marble that makes out the hat. She’s now adding a new work to the series: a 1,200-pound marble bag of trash that she says depicts “the chaos that is going on.”

Antar made her marble MAGA hat after she first saw Donald Trump first wearing the hat on the campaign trail. She recalls that when the work came out in 2016, it prompted so much controversy on her social media channels that she had to remove the photos from her website and Instagram page for several months. Now, as we’re gearing up for the Trump sequel, she is giving it another go. Last week, she decided to take it out of storage and put it up for sale (a perfect gift for Elon Musk to unironically to test the Cybertruck’s glass panes).

Antar tells me that she made the MAGA hat using a CNC machine, a device that uses a CAD model file to drive a drill to turn a block of solid white marble into a 3D object. After the CNC had made the basic shape, she then “re-carved all the details to achieve the ultra-realistic effect” she wanted. 

The ultra-realism is one of the key aspects of her pop-culture record work. “All of my work is rooted in observation, whatever is going on, I express it in stone,” she tells me. One of the happiest days of her life, she tells me, is when the U.S. government wrote to tell her that she couldn’t copyright one of her artworks because it too closely resembled the product that she chose to record in stone.