To me the biggest story of the week is the decision of the Warhol Authentication Board to de-certify copies of Andy Warhol's artwork on the grounds that he had no hand in producing them. This touches numerous issues - the original-vs-reproduction controversy that rages in the print world, the market value of pop-art icons of dubious authorship, the fate of private and public pop-art collections with hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in such works, invocation of standards that turn $15-million treasures into worthless junk.

Does this signal a change in taste that takes 1960s-style pop art and its more recent conceptual sequalae out of the contemporary canon? How are the museum curators and trustees who were responsible for funneling huge amounts of taxpayer money into pop-art copies reacting to the news? What about the contemporary galleries that have been pushing these works as gilt-edge investments?

I would have thought there would be numerous follow-up stories, but the silence is deafening. Surely some enterprising reporters could ask what's going on here? I hope there will be more coverage of this important story, and perhaps other readers do as well.

Cordially,

Peter Miller
The Kamakura Print Collection
Kamakura, Japan