Sure, the curators behind Ten Thousand Cents may have committed the most highly attended, poorly compensated forgery of all time. And every individual piece does look a bit like an MSPaint sketch up close. But shrink them all down and the bigger picture is revealed as a not-half-bad reproduction of the US $100 bill.
Recruited through Amazon's crowdsourcing site, participants flocked to the task with no knowledge of the bigger picture, and each received a penny for their effort.
Not everyone went along quietly though. Instead of duplicating his assigned block of art, one participant simply scrawled “$0.01? Really?”
(Thanks, Dan!)
“
I like the random extras. There's one spot in the top beige line that has a dark splotch in it. The artist starts off right, then adds a big thick grey swoosh at the end.
I wonder why.
”