Pablo Picasso, Buste de mousquetaire, 1968. Courtesy: QoQa

25,000 internet users have contributed towards the collective ownership of Picasso’s Musketeer Bust (1968), amounting to USD$2 million.

40,000 shares in the artwork, for USD$50 each, were offered through the Swiss bargain website QoQa. Founded in 2005 with the slogan ‘We do anything, but it’s all for you’, QoQa is normally used to purchase household items or cheap travel deals.

Qoqa put the Picasso painting up for sale last December. Company chief and founder Pascal Meyer told AFP that the aim with selling the artwork was for it ‘to go viral’. He also claimed that the sale was about democratizing the art world, which Meyer said was often regarded as ‘closed and obscure’ and ‘inaccessible to regular people’.

The new owners will now have to make a collective decision over where the artwork is exhibited. It was unveiled last week at Geneva’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, MAMCO, where it will remain until October.

Don’t miss Daniel Baumann’s 2016 feature from our archives, which looks at whether we are evolving from a collector-driven art world to an audience-driven one. ‘An audience-driven art world would be less defined by privilege, exclusivity and segregation’, he proposes. But Baumann also warns: ‘you might argue that the supposedly growing importance of the audience is a mere mirage, subtly diverting our attention from the insidious relationship between power and distraction.’