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This Picasso will be cut into 150,000 tiny pieces if voters decide to be selfish

This is allegedly one of Pablo Picasso's Tête de Faune prints. The modern artist printed a run of 50 of them in 1962, just 11 years before he died.

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But now a game company with a dark sense of humor claims it may be about to laser-cut one of those 50 original Picassos into 150,000 tiny pieces.

It's uncertain how the eight male founders of Cards Against Humanity (CAH), which makes an adults-only card game of the same name, got a hold of one of the prints, how much they paid, or if it's even authentic.

picasso tete de fauna tech insider cropped
Tech Insider (Courtesy Cards Against Humanity)

The Verge speculates they bought it from a Swiss auction house for roughly $14,000 in June 2015, but said Max Temkin, a CAH co-founder, "refused" to share any information with them.

Whatever the case, we wouldn't put it past the game company to put Tête de Faune's death or donation to the vote of 150,000 fans.

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Those fans subscribed to the company's special winter promotion, called "Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah."

As part of the promotion, which netted an estimated $2.25 million for CAH, each person received eight envelopes over the eight days of Hanukkah. Every envelope was packed full of surprises — some heartfelt, some gimmicky, and some shocking.

The seventh envelope contained a small postcard with Tête de Faune printed on the front (photo above). The back of the card said:

Today, you are all going to be part of a social experiment.

We've used the money for today's gift to purchase Tête de Faune, an original 1962 Picasso. You can see a photo of it on the other side of this card.

As one of 150,000 subscribers to our Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah, you now get the chance to vote: should we donate this work to the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, or should we laser-cut it into 150,000 tiny squares and send you your own scrap of a Picasso?

To some subscribers' horror or delight, the page where you vote included a video (uploaded to Vimeo by CAH co-founder Max Temkin) of the supposed print in a laser cutter.

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Smoke blows over the artwork as the laser cutter's guide light moves across the linoleum print's surface. Meanwhile, Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" plays in the background:

Picasso on the Laser from Max Temkin on Vimeo.

Voting started Dec. 26 and ended on Dec. 31, 2015.

I know this because my wife bought me a subscription, mainly to get us some unique cards added to our playing deck, but also to see what kind of crazy antics CAH would cook up.

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For the sake of preserving an original Picasso, I hope fans voted to donate it to the Art Institute of Chicago. But part of me wonders how, exactly, you'd cut a 64.1-by-53.3-centimeter print into 150,000 pieces, let alone mail them to that many people.

If you do the math, the print is 339,200 millimeters squared. Cut into 150,000 pieces, that's 2.278 mm2 per person — a speck of paper small enough to fit in the palm of a LEGO person's hand.

However, that's before you account for an ungodly number of laser cuts; practically nothing would be left, even if the cuts were microscopically thin in size. Cards Against Humanity might be better off burning the whole print, smudging a bit of ash on a card, and then sending that to subscribers.

I've been refreshing the Picasso page constantly to see what voters decided, but for days all it has said is "Voting is closed! Check back soon for the results."

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By the way, I got the Picasso card after Dec. 31 — too late to cast my vote. So whatever happens to it, assuming it is indeed authentic, don't blame me.

Art
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