Sandy Cohen’s “Fuck This Shit”

There is a progression happening across Sandy Cohen’s animal canvases, and if you have been following this series, you already feel it, even if you haven’t named it yet.

The rabbits in In Vino Veritas were civilized about it. They sat with their Romanée-Conti and their cigarettes and their impeccable bow ties, and what they wrote on the wall above them was four words of quiet, devastating clarity: I hate everyone. Neat handwriting. Formal posture. The right wine. Truth arrived with manners.

The cats are done with manners.

Sandy Cohen made “Fuck This Shit” in 2025. It is 60 by 60 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, a full foot larger than the rabbits, which is not an accident. The price is $33,000. The title requires no interpretation.

What’s Changed, and Why It Matters

The first thing you notice is the upgrade in brand vocabulary. The cat on the left wears an Hermès scarf, the specific orange of the Hermès box, the color that functions as its own form of social currency, the color that signals not just wealth but the particular kind of wealth that has been through Paris. Over on the right, the second cat wears a Louis Vuitton tie, the LV monogram on the knot, black on black, understated in the way that nothing Louis Vuitton makes is actually understated.

Between them, two bottles on a small gold side table, one empty, one labeled Wölffer — the Wölffer Estate Vineyard bottle, the rosé produced on Sayre’s Path in East Hampton since 1992, the wine that predates the Instagram rosé industrial complex by two decades. Serious East End people were drinking Wölffer before drinking East End wine became a personality. Not aspirational in the Hamptons — geographic is the better word. Grown from this soil, present on the right tables long enough to stop needing to announce itself, Wölffer belongs here the way old money belongs here: quietly, without explanation.

In the previous painting, the Romanée-Conti announced old money, deep acquisition, the kind of knowledge that takes decades to earn. Here, Cohen has traded the grand cru Burgundy for the bottle that is not imported-to-the-East-End but of-the-East-End. Local provenance makes the cats’ verdict above it more pointed, not less. And above it all, in the casual handwriting of someone who has stopped pretending: Fuck This Shit.

You can read the earlier entry in this series at In Vino Veritas: Two Rabbits Walk Into a Bar at the End of the World. Together, these two paintings are doing something that takes a moment to see, and then you cannot unsee it.

The Escalation Thesis

Cohen is not repeating herself. She is arguing something across a body of work.

In Many Lives, Many Masters, the white dog in the blue suit kneels toward the word LOVE faint on its own palm. That painting asks what survives all the performance, what remains when every layer of accumulation has been shed. Its posture is almost devotional. Its tone is grief made luminous.

After that came the rabbits. They had assembled the Romanée-Conti and the formal wear and the full ceremonial apparatus of the successful dinner party. Still, the verdict above them was cold and clear — not screamed, but observed, the handwriting of a scientist recording a result.

The Third Animal, The Loudest Statement

Now the cats. Hermès scarf. LV tie. Wölffer — the bottle that the people who actually know the East End have been drinking for thirty years, which the people who arrived recently have now also discovered, which means the signal has traveled the full distance from local knowledge to seasonal ritual. Cigarettes held with aggressive nonchalance, one dangling from the mouth in the specific posture of someone who has decided not to care about the rules of the room anymore.

The text above them has lost its punctuation and most of its patience. It is not an observation. It is a declaration.

Cohen’s animals are tracking a soul’s movement through the stages of luxury saturation: aspiration, acquisition, arrangement, and finally, the morning after you’ve assembled everything, the verdict. What distinguishes “Fuck This Shit” from the rabbit painting is not volume but specificity. The cats know exactly what the shit is: the scarf that required a waitlist, the tie whose monogram has completed every irony cycle available to it, the Wölffer that has been on this ground longer than most of the people drinking it have been summering here and that is now, somehow, also a costume. Beyond all of it: the whole warm bath of correct signaling that you can get very good at maintaining and that will never once tell you who you actually are.

The Hermès Scarf as Punchline

You cannot write about this painting without staying with the orange scarf for a moment.

Hermès is, among other things, the most effective luxury brand in the world at manufacturing scarcity — at making people feel the acute social cost of not having the thing. Consider the Birkin waitlist, the colorway allocation, the store politics. All of it is designed to make the scarf or the bag feel like an achievement rather than a purchase, to blur the line between taste and accumulation until the person wearing the orange cannot tell which one they are doing.

Cohen puts that scarf on a black cat with yellow eyes and a cigarette dangling from its mouth and writes “Fuck This Shit” above its head. The joke is not that the cat is wearing the wrong scarf. It is that the cat is wearing the right one.

The Louis Vuitton tie operates the same way. That monogram is so recognizable that it has cycled through every conceivable status register, from old-money understatement to new-money display to ironic reclamation and back. By 2025, the logo has traveled so far around the cultural track that wearing it is its own form of exhaustion. The cat wearing it knows this. Hence the expression. Hence the cigarette.

The Note in the Corner

Also note the small text in the lower left corner of the canvas: “Let’s go to Bilbo.” Not Malibu. Not somewhere far away and hypothetical. Bilbo — shorthand for Le Bilboquet, the French restaurant on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor that has operated as the East End’s most coveted power-lunch table since Philippe Delgrange opened its doors in 2017. The kind of place where Tom Brady and Hugh Jackman have been spotted at the next table, where the dress code is enforced with Gallic cheerfulness and absolute firmness, where the Cajun chicken is the most socially loaded dish on the South Fork, and where getting a reservation in July without knowing someone is its own form of aspiration management.

That corner text is the most psychologically precise element in the painting, and understanding what it actually says changes everything. This is not an escape fantasy. These cats are not fleeing the performance. They are scheduling the next act of it. They have said “Fuck This Shit” above the Wölffer and the Hermès scarf and the LV tie, and their immediate follow-up move is to book a table at the most see-and-be-seen room on the East End waterfront. The rebellion lasts exactly as long as it takes to text the group chat.

The Complete Sentence

Cohen is making a very specific argument here, and it is sharper than it first appears. These cats are not hypocrites. They are honest about what they are. “Fuck This Shit” and “Let’s go to Bilbo” are not contradictions — they are the complete sentence. The first half is the private verdict. The second half is what you do next anyway, because the alternative is staying home, and staying home is not actually on the table for anyone wearing an Hermès scarf at a Wölffer tasting. You can read our full feature on the restaurant, its founder, and why its waterfront table has become the East End’s most reliable index of who matters this season at Le Bilboquet Sag Harbor: A Dining Experience.

The Geography of Clarity

Cohen primarily creates from her studio in the Hamptons, still managing a health condition whose symptoms wax and wane, but remaining confident and determined in her work. That biographical fact is not incidental to a painting called “Fuck This Shit.” It is, specifically, the source material.

Her career was on a meteoric rise when, at nineteen, she became severely disabled with a devastating neurological condition due to adverse reactions to antibiotics — an event that kept her bedridden and dependent on a wheelchair for nearly two decades before she re-emerged onto the art scene in 2017. What that two-decade absence produces, in a person who comes back to make art about luxury and status and the performance of arrival, is not bitterness and not envy and not contempt. It produces clarity about exactly which parts of the social apparatus are real and which parts are theater, and what the theater is covering for.

These Cats Believed

The cats in “Fuck This Shit” are not cynical. Cynicism is the pose of someone who never believed in the first place. These cats believed. They acquired the scarf, tied the tie, opened the Wölffer and lit the cigarettes and sat at the table and went through the whole ritual with full commitment. What they have arrived at is not disappointment but comprehension — the record of a person, through her animals, finally naming the thing she has understood for a long time.

You can track the full collector ecosystem that has recognized this understanding at Sandy Cohen: The Hamptons Artist Whose Collectors Are Already the Canon. The rooms that have her work are not buying cynicism. They are buying the version of the truth they have also been living inside and were waiting for someone to say out loud.

What the Cats Are Wearing Versus What the Cats Are Saying

There is one more thing to name before you leave this painting.

The cats are beautiful. Cohen is a technically exceptional painter, and the brushwork on these two animals carries real visual authority. Black fur catches light with the kind of precision that separates trained seeing from casual looking. Those yellow eyes are alert, not glazed. Overall, the composition is balanced in the way expensive things are balanced — with intention. The gold side table is elegant. The palette works: the teal field, the warm orange of the scarf, the cool background holding all of it in tension.

Cohen’s work refuses fragility, rejects apology, and replaces passive beauty with sovereign architecture. Where glamour has historically been framed as ornamental, she renders it structural. This is exactly what is happening in “Fuck This Shit.” The painting is not ugly because the cats are angry. It is beautiful because they are right.

She will not let the critique undercut the object. That Hermès scarf is painted as beautifully as an actual Hermès scarf deserves to be painted. The LV monogram carries the weight of something that costs what it costs. The Wölffer label is legible. Luxury is honored in the execution even as it is indicted in the text.

That is the harder thing to do. Any artist can mock the Hermès scarf by making it look cheap. Cohen makes it look real and then lets the cat wearing it speak.

What the cat says, in the handwriting of someone who has been at this exact table for longer than you’ve been following, is the thing you say when the performance is finally, at long last, optional.

Where The Conversation Continues

“Fuck This Shit” by Sandy Cohen. 2025. 60″x60″, oil and acrylic on canvas. $33,000. Available at SandyCohenArt.com. Follow her studio at @sandycohensart on Instagram.

This is part of our ongoing series on Sandy Cohen’s work. Read In Vino Veritas, Many Lives, Many Masters, and the collector circle hub to follow the full arc of the argument she is making across canvases.

To feature your collection, practice, or brand in Social Life Magazine, visit sociallifemagazine.com/advertise. Twenty-five thousand print copies, Westhampton to Montauk, Memorial Day through Labor Day. The cats already know what we’re about.