I feel like Andy would love this if he was still alive today. Although he was a talented artist, his real art was in making money, and he wasn’t above a little subterfuge to do it. He used to hire impersonators to do his public performances for him.
Clever, but I think the real business model behind this has more to do with the economics of lotteries. That is, perhaps they could have pulled the same stunt without making 999 replicas but rather selling a ticket to win the Andy Warhol and ended up with same result. But then they couldn't have made their counterculture point I guess.
Nah, it’s no fun for 999 people to end up with a useless lottery ticket, this way everyone ends up with wall art and a fun story. Much more entertaining than just buying a reproduction, much cheaper than buying an original.
I feel like there will definitely be a way to tell the original apart, with sufficient skill/tech (after all, forgeries are uncovered). The question is who will take the 99.9% risk of devaluing their painting by having it tested and turned into a a definite forgery.