A thousand Andy Warhol sketches are for sale but there’s a catch – 999 are fake

For $250 (£182), you could bag yourself an original Andy Warhol sketch.

It may sound too good to be true, but that’s because there’s a catch: There’s only one authentic sketch mixed in with 999 high-quality copies.

The original 1954 “Fairies” piece consists of three nude fairies playing with a jump rope. It’s now worth approximately $20,000, according to Daniel Greenberg, chief revenue officer of MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based collective famed for its viral creations.

In a further twist, “any record of which piece within the set is the original has been destroyed”, meaning that you could unknowingly be the lucky ‘one in a thousand’ to claim Warhol’s sketch and have no idea.

It’s all a part of a MSCHF exhibition, Museum of Forgeries, to represent the pretentiousness of art collecting, while at the same time making valuable pieces accessible to regular people. “By burying a needle in a needlestack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications,” MSCHF said on its site.

“Ubiquity is the darkness in which novelty and the avant-garde die their truest deaths. More than slashed canvas or burned pages, democratization of access or ownership destroys any work premised on exclusivity,” they added.

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This isn’t the first time MSCHF have toyed with unique concepts. They created The 1 Million Dollar Puzzle, which allows people to purchase a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle for $30. Once completed, they scan a QR code and are in with the chance of winning between 25 cents to $1,000,000.

The collective also collaborated with rapper Lil Nas X on the notorious Satan Shoes, where 666 pairs of Nike Air Max 97s with satanic symbolism were up for sale for $1,018 each– a reference to Luke 10:18, a Bible verse about Satan’s fall to heaven.