A 1954 drawing by Andy Warhol, titled Fairies, has been appropriated into a brand new work by the Brooklyn-based collective MSCHF (that’s mischief, for the uninitiated) as a part of the collective’s Museum of Forgeries undertaking.
The collective says that their work—titled Presumably Actual Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol (2021)—is a sequence of 1,000 an identical artworks. They’re all positively by MSCHF, and in addition all probably by Andy Warhol. Any file of which piece throughout the set is the unique has been destroyed.
The unique Warhol was scanned and 999 copies had been redrawn by a robotic arm. In response to a video on the collective’s web site, every copy then underwent a degradation course of earlier than being authenticated as Presumably Actual Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol by MSCHF, then shuffled collectively and bought for $250 every. The drawing was supposedly bought in 2016 for $8,125.
“The capital-A Artwork World is way extra involved with authenticity than aesthetics, as confirmed again and again by conceptual works bought primarily as paperwork and documentation,” the collective says. “By forging Fairies en masse, we obliterate the path of provenance for the paintings. Although bodily undamaged, we destroy any future confidence within the veracity of the work. By burying a needle in a needlestack, we render the unique as a lot a forgery as any of our replications.”
The collective provides that the copies—or “extra precisely the whole efficiency of copying and promoting” Faries—belongs to them. Subsequently, there aren’t 1000 copies of a Warhol on the market, however slightly 1000 co-owners of a single work by the collective. On condition that Warhol embraced all issues mass produced, one wonders whether or not he would increase a milkshake to the brand new work.
