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.

The capital-A Art World is far more concerned with authenticity than aesthetics, as proven time and again by conceptual works sold primarily as paperwork and documentation. Artwork provenance tracks the life and times of a particular piece–a record of ownership, appearances, and sales. An entire sub-industry of forensic and investigative conservation exists for this purpose.

By forging Poisson en masse, we obliterate the trail of provenance for the artwork. Though physically undamaged, we destroy any future confidence in the veracity of the work. By burying a needle in a needlestack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications.

All else being equal, an original is worth more than a copy; a unique work is worth more than an editioned work. It’s common practice for a gallery to increase the price of prints in their inventory as more are sold–local scarcity sets the price, even though the total extant quantity is unchanged.

Walter Benjamin might say that copies diminish the artistic value of the original because they exist outside the work’s original, unique context, thereby diluting the singularity of the original’s existence in culture that initially imbued it with aura.

Paradoxically, for artists, successfully merching down an object = consistent, increased revenue. Posters, prints, or easily replicable derivative works turn an artwork into a product line, and when you hit the big time product lines tend to be net more profitable than a handful of masterworks. Copies reduce value but increase revenue.

The copies are ours. More accurately, the entire performance of copying and selling is ours. Not 250 identical artworks, but a single overarching piece with two hundred and fifty co-owners and co-participants. The act of creation is the act of upcycling culture into recombinant forms. Poisson by Pablo Picasso, is now a MSCHF artwork.

After an artist’s death, everything they ever touched becomes a potentially undiscovered work. Pablo Picasso has some 50,000 documented artworks. Having duplicate certificates of authenticity is the gold standard. Two different heirs became sometimes-competing authenticators of Picasso’s work; Both are now dead. This wooden fish, made, reportedly, as a gift for P’s housekeeper, a sort of handmade holiday bonus, is a sculpture. And who can say otherwise?