Artnet News
Oct. 19, 2010

SWEDISH BRILLOS ARE BUNK: WARHOL AUTHENTICATION BOARD

It’s one of the most famous arguments in all of art theory: Arthur Danto’s claim that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures represent the "end of art," because they don’t have any distinguishing features -- it’s just art because the artist says it is. Well, the Andy Warhol Authentication Board begs to differ. In a 27-page encyclical (available for perusal courtesy the L.A. Times’ Christopher Knight), the board rules that a slew of more than 100 boxes are of dubious authenticity, essentially fabrications by free-wheeling Swedish curator and sometime Warhol collaborator Pontus Hulten (1924-2006). The board also lays out precise formal guidelines designed to separate the real Brillos from the clones.

A frequent critique of the Venice Biennale is its organization into national pavilions. As a legacy of the first Biennale of 1895, when nations were young, naive, and given to a prideful beating of their imperial wings, the idea of identifying particular art with a particular country and then competing for the best of show, a Golden Lion, might have once seemed appropriate. It now seems wholly anachronistic. In our current climate of globalization, of multi-national corporations and commissions funding large exhibitions in far flung territories, of curators and artists hopping from one project and one continent to another, segregation according to nationality appears somewhat fusty and quaint.