I love love love this prank by art collective, MSCHF.
They bought an original Andy Warhol sketch for $20,000, and mixed it randomly into a stack of 999 exact forgeries of the original sketch. For $250, buyers could purchase one of the 1,000 artworks for sale.
“By burying a needle in a needle stack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications.”
I love this prank because it wrestles with so many ideas and themes in one project: value, destruction, quality, aesthetics, probability, fraud, ownership, and many more.
For example, if no one knows who actually has the original, would it be fair to say there are now 1,000 owners of the Warhol sketch?
Is this forgery spectacle an admirable, progressive form of art, or is it simply disrespectful to Warhol?
I’m a big fan.