Fine dining chefs can keep their artful plates — it’s the quirky shapes inside Cheetos bags that have earned their own Cheetos Museum.
The trippy new Cheetos Museum will make you feel as if you’ve stepped into an art show hosted inside a bag of the orangest chips in the snack aisle. Much bigger than the pop-up gallery in Grand Central that started it all, the museum was built using more than 128,900 Cheetos and has an “infinity room” where mirrors will make it seem like your entire world is just cheese snacks now, sorry not sorry.
Opened for the summer inside Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium in Times Square — itself a brain-twist ride through the oddities of the human and natural world — there’s not one but two giant sculptures of mascot Chester Cheetah made out of the orange stuff, and separate halls for Cheesy Cheetos and Flamin’ Hot flavors to avoid outbreaks of a cheesy turf war.
There are walls made of Cheetos and a giant swirled funnel of Cheetos rising out of a Cheetos bag that, alas, is not also made of Cheetos. Among the Cheeto sculptures are the real stars: eater-submitted individual Cheetos in shapes from “Swimmer” to “Flamingo” and “Pineapple” displayed in glass cabinets and, for the best, their own glass pedestals. Some take a bit of imagination, but many are definitely not like reading cloud formations.
Like actual works of art, each work of baked snack food art bears a label with the name of the lucky visionary who pulled it out of the bag and the date of its discovery. What, no locations? Is there a chance for cooler Cheetos in Greece than Wisconsin? Art-minded snack fans want to know — because there’s a lot of money riding on it.
The online version of the museum at cheetosmuseum.com is now accepting submissions for its second annual Most Unique Cheetos Shape contest through Aug. 6. Two weekly prizes of $5,000 will be given away for the best online submissions to the museum’s digital gallery; in August, all the chosen shapes will be put to a public vote for a $50,000 grand prize and its own display at the Cheetos Museum.
It’s not quite painting something that lands on the walls of the Met, but you also get the rest of a bag of chips to eat after finding a piece of art. Check out the Cheetos Museum at 234 W. 42nd St. from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily.
