«IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE»

News that the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is to shut down its authentication board next year has hit the art market like a bombshell. Warhol is, in the words of the journalist Bryan Appleyard, “the art market’s one-man Dow Jones”. His sales last year totalled some £313m and represented 17 per cent of all contemporary art auction sales; only Picasso grossed more in 2010. The board still has 175 works to pronounce on, 100 of them belonging to the Mugrabi family of dealers, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Mugrabis are widely thought to have about 800 Warhols in their treasure chest, although they have never confirmed the exact number, and Jose Mugrabi has castigated the decision to close the board as “totally irresponsible”.But the decision might offer hope to owners of works previously denied by the board, such as the filmmaker Joe Simon, who lost a massively expensive legal battle against the board to get his portrait by Warhol accepted as genuine. Simon says: “There are many other cases now about to come to light.”


-Financial Times