Special Rolex Replica with Editorial Price, Value and the Strange Case

Owned by Paul Newman and given by him to his daughter’s boyfriend, The Paul Newman Daytona replica has been called overhyped, and it is obvious that the accusation is significantly correct, as a matter of fact, you could say that for the PNPND (so I’ll call the Paul Newman’s Paul Newman Daytona, for the sake of brevity) being overhyped is dispensable for it to be what it is. Without the hype, what you have, after all, is a somewhat quirky take on a mass-produced, mid-century sports watch, with slightly offbeat aesthetics, high-quality construction given the manufacturing technology available at the time, and a reliable if ubiquitous chronograph movement, of interest for what it represents in the evolution of timekeeping technology. Without the hype, in other words, you have a watch that is difficult to distinguish in every major respect from many, many other wristwatches of its time – hundreds of thousands of them. 
All this is fairly obvious; as anyone who is seriously involved in collecting vintage watches as a hobby probably knows, the PNPND was something of a great storm. It’s the ancestor to, and originator of, what is to those who don’t share it, an inexplicable passion for a special fake Rolex model. But it’s also a watch with a connection to a major figure in American arts and its own right, a piece of Americana; if you were a collector of anything from replica watches to Hollywood memorabilia to Paul Newman ephemera, you were probably going to take at least a passing interest in the watch.
Whether or not the actual design of exotic dial Daytonas has anything to do, even in the slightest, with the high prices paid for them, depends on who you ask; I struggle to see anything more than happenstance quirkiness in them, but people whose taste I respect a great deal (some of whom, more relevantly, have a taste that is widely respected and used as a benchmark for defining quality in watch design, and for other watch collectors) have said, and written, with a straight face, that it’s “one of the most beautiful replica watches of all time.” (If it could read, the Daniels Space Traveller would probably go white to its bow, rush to the mirror, and, like the queen in Snow White, demand who the fairest of them all really is.)
The entire matter raises two questions, which form the center of most of the conversation about not only the PNPND but also the seemingly endless drumbeat of record-setting prices in watch auctions in general. The first is, “Is it worth it?” and the second is, “Is it bad for watch collecting?”