Guardians of Slock

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

“Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.”
--Pop artist Andy Warhol

When Andy Warhol died due to complications resulting from gallbladder surgery in 1987, his estate, which included millions of dollars in unsold artwork, came under the watchful guardianship of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. To protect the legacy of Pop Art’s grand master, The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. was formed in 1995. They sought to prevent forged prints and paintings from winding their way into private hands as well as museums. Guarding the insubstantial, it turns out, is proving more difficult than first imagined and inadvertently opened a Campbell’s Soup can of worms.

Warhol had a hands-off approach in the way he produced art. When I say produced, I mean it in the truest sense of the word. After all, his followers called his art studio the “Factory.” The toxic solvents and pungent fumes from the inks and paints, as well as the furious pace of production for works Warhol demanded from his assistants, gave the studio the air of a sweatshop. Many of the silkscreen prints (some call them paintings) were the original works of artist/assistants, with little to no creative input from the gaunt maestro. Warhol did for the fine arts what Henry Ford did for the automobile industry, mass-produce items for veracious consumers, building tremendous wealth and fame in the process. How do you verify the authenticity of an “original Warhol” when much of it was the brainchild and handiwork of so many others?

Joe Simon, an American filmmaker living in London, confronted this painful problem when he recently attempted to sell a 1965 Warhol self-portrait that he purchased in the late 1970s.

Simon originally bought the piece for the tidy sum of $195,000. He hoped to fetch nearly $2-million for its sale. Fred Hughes, a past President of the Warhol Foundation, authenticated Simon’s Warhol shortly after its purchase. But when he decided to sell it, Simon thought submitting the print to the Warhol Art Authentication Board for its stamp of approval would enhance the piece's provenance and value. Instead, the secretive group stamped “DENIED” on the back of the work, which effectively rendered the print worthless. In the board's view, the image was printed outside the Factory and did not fall within the slack orbit of Warhol’s minimalist supervision.

In his $20-million lawsuit, Simon accuses the Warhol Foundation of purposefully denying the authenticity of great numbers of Warhol works. This, Simon alleges, increases the value of the foundation’s Warhol collection while culling the number of competitors in one masterstroke.

Should any of this come as a surprise? Warhol, like many of his spoiled generation, was the product of post-war prosperity and the intense commercialism it spawned. His work is an expression of the crass consumerism many of his generation claim to detest and, therefore, is nothing less than cynicism applied to canvas.

The dark patron saint of nihilism said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.” Warhol was wrong. Behind the life and works that defined Andy Warhol and his generation is stamped, in bold letters, the word “DENIED.”

--Mr. Curmudgeon