Andy Warhol began his career by mocking the notion of art’s sanctimonious status and elevated value. He recycled grubby tabloid headlines, mimicked the mass-produced stock in supermarkets, and called his industrially busy studio the Factory. His witty sabotage was only too successful: art enabled him to magically conjure up money, and when he died in 1987 he left an estate worth $220m.
After Warhol’s death, a foundation set up in his name vowed to redistribute this wealth to needy artists as well as subsidising a reliable catalogue of his work; an authentication board was established to protect the market from proliferating fakes. The board’s judgments were issued by fiat, and in 2001 its experts ruled that a silk-screened self-portrait, which the American collector Joe Simon (also known as Joe Simon-Whelan) hoped to resell for $2m, had not been made by Warhol, even though it was stamped with his signature and inscribed by his business manager. Simon’s print was returned with DENIED stamped on the back in indelible red ink that penetrated the canvas and rendered it worthless.
