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Cards Against Humanity Is Asking People to Vote on Whether It Cuts Up a Picasso

The company is promising to either laser cut the work and ship the pieces to customers or donate it to a museum.

Cards Against Humanity, the party game where players fill in the blanks in sentences with phrases like "my dad's fucking dumb face" and "a big black dick," is threatening to destroy an original Picasso print.

Earlier this month, the game's makers launched a promotion called "Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah." Exactly 150,000 people signed up and paid $15 each to receive eight gifts. Past gifts included multiple days of socks, a donation to public radio, and a week off for employees at the Chinese printing facility that produces Cards Against Humanity's decks.

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For the seventh gift, the company is asking its 150,000 subscribers to vote on the fate of an original 1962 Picasso lino-cut called "Tête de Faune."

"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 everyone their own scrap of a real Picasso?" the company says on the website for the promotion.

The voting starts December 26 and runs until December 31.

Cards Against Humanity claims it used subscriber dollars to buy the print, which may be this one put up for auction on the art site Artsy, which would make it one of 50 linoleum cuts. Cards Against Humanity and the Art Institute of Chicago did not respond to requests for comment.

The choice has already launched a debate.

"This is defacing a beautiful object that will never exist again for shits and giggles. It is far worse than burning books," wrote one commenter on Reddit. "Donating it would be far cooler because the donor gets to decide the credit line for the work of art," another wrote. "They could have a credit line that read something like 'Gift of 150,000 Cards Against Humanity fans,' or whatever." Another wrote simply, "Vulgar and stupid."

And on the other side: "Cut it up Fuck Picasso."

While comparisons have been drawn to Erased de Kooning Drawing, a piece of art by Robert Rauschenberg created when he erased and then framed a drawing by American artist Willem de Kooning, it's helpful to recall that Cards Against Humanity's promotion is also an ad for the company.

The irony of the Picasso experiment—which its creators are well aware of—is that the value of the Picasso is realistically pretty low (around $14,100). While museums collect Picassos of many editions and even his scraps and loose doodles, this piece is no "Guernica." That said, one could argue that the artistic value of the piece may actually be increased by this "social experiment."

Or, as one Redditor wrote about Cards Against Humanity: "Everything they do is gimmicky. They come up with some pretty good gimmicks though."