Having just finished Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), I want to report that you cannot have any more fun reading a novel from that century. (Which is saying a lot.) It’s a detective story with some initial elements that later become commonplace: a country house party with eccentric guests, a missing diamond, incompetent local constables, a lovely young lady, a likable young man, and a genius of a detective who has an absorbing hobby. (“The Great Cuff” cares for roses as Holmes loves his violin and Nero Wolfe, his orchids). All this is described by a Watson-like narrator who has trustworthy motives but less perception than the reader.

But then, since Collins is a fount of plot ideas rather than a derivative writer, the story veers away from what will later become the formula of a drawing room detective story. We are soon reading text by other narrators and following the course of a troubled love story. By the time we’re done, we’ve been to India, heard the lamentable story of man from the colonies whose life is ruined by racist prejudice as well as disease and scandal, and observed a scientific experiment meant to reveal the location of the lost Moonstone.

It is all very suspenseful, and suspense is an explicit topic of the narration. (The experiment at the end, in particular, requires creating suspense for several onlookers.) All this was grist for my sister’s mill. In The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, Caroline Levine argues that Victorian novelists developed new techniques for creating suspense. This was not just a trick or a way of providing entertainment and pleasure. Rather, they put their readers through an experience of suspending judgment and awaiting evidence that was reminiscent of science and that had a similar moral purpose. In the Moonstone, as she notes, the suspense catches the attention of onlookers who have been confused by prejudice and makes them reach the moral truth.

In passing, she explains that Collins was one of the first novelists to complain that reviews gave away too much plot. The same writer who more or less invented the detective novel was also an early critic of “spoilers.” Strangely enough, the back cover of my copy of the Moonstone (Barnes & Noble Classics, 1993) gives away a major event that only occurs on page 447 of a 472-page novel. It was probably the worst spoiler that I have ever seen on a book cover, but fortunately I came to believe it was an outright error and so was pleasurably surprised when the event actually occurred.

The moral backbone of Tolstoy’s War & Peace seems to be a distinction, or maybe a continuum. Simple, authentic virtue is at one end, and complexity, affectation, and vice are on the other:

At first, I read with great resistance, because this moral scheme seems wrong to me. If you have the choice, shouldn’t you be bilingual rather than monolingual, curious rather than ignorant, and ambitious for the good rather than fatalistic and passive?

But then I began to realize that the moral scheme is more complicated. Complexity and artifice are always bad in War and Peace, but they have several alternatives–as symbolized by the fates of the main characters:

• Prince Andrei always has an instinct for the purely abstract, the completely simple; a love of absence. He senses his ideal when, badly wounded at Austerlitz, he stares at the empty blue vault of the sky. His end is perfect renunciation, an embrace of death as the negation of life.
• Both Natasha and Marya find fulfillment by completely submerging themselves in family life and marriage–an ideal that strikes me as patriarchal.
• Nikolai Rostov becomes a good landowner, putting the peasants’ welfare ahead of his own and managing his farm well. He finds fulfillment in work, when previously (488) he was only good when idle.
• Pierre loses his pretensions and his “great man theory” of history. By the end, he would no longer want to assassinate Napoleon to achieve fame. His hero is the fatalistic peasant Karataev. But Pierre continues to care about politics and to love a particular wife and family.

If Pierre is the moral heart of the novel, I can find a spirit here to endorse.

(All quotations from the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 2007)

Background: According to Richard Dorment in The New York Review, Andy Warhol had a picture of himself taken in a photo booth in 1965. He had the image transferred to acetate plates so that he could turn it into a silkscreen print. However, at the suggestion of a friend, he decided “to send the acetates to a commercial printer for silkscreening.” As a result, he never touched the prints, although in 1969 he signed one and dedicated it to his dealer Bruno Bischopfberger. Later, it became Warhol’s standard practice to have his works manufactured commercially and then sign them. In 1970, the same self-portrait was reproduced on the cover of Warhol’s catalogue raisonné (a book purporting to show all of an artist’s authentic work). Presented with this volume, a delighted Warhol signed his name across the cover.

Nowadays, there is an “Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc.” that determines whether individual objects are genuine “Warhols.” The Board has denied that the self-portrait of 1965 is genuine. “It is the opinion of the authentication board that said work is NOT the work of Andy Warhol, but that said work was signed, dedicated, and dated by him.” When the Board has physical control of a disputed work that it rejects, Dorment writes, the work “is mutilated by stamping it in ink on the reverse with the word “DENIED”—thereby rendering the picture unsaleable even if the board later changes its mind.”

Dorment launches a fierce attack on the Board. But how can its actions make objects “worthless”? If you think a Warhol is a striking image that would enliven your wall, you can buy one and prize it even if the back has been stamped “DENIED.” In fact, you can make your own version of this perfectly reproducible object and it will be as striking as the one Warhol had manufactured in 1965.

If you think a Warhol has value because the physical object is directly connected to the late artist of that name, the connection that you prize is real (or not) regardless of what the Authentication Board says.

If you bought a Warhol at auction, you may fear that the “DENIED” stamp will cause its resale value to plummet. But the resale value is just a function of what other people think about the object. Why should you substitute their opinion for yours?

For myself, I would much rather have a Warhol with a DENIED stamp applied by a Pynchonesque “Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc.” To me, the stamp would not be a “mutiliation” of the original object, but a consummation of the original concept. In fact, if a DENIED Warhol were available for cheap, I might buy it on the bet that those stamps will become priceless.

The conceptual art of Duchamp and Warhol made theoretical points that really couldn’t have been argued in prose. These two forced us to acknowledge that a work of art is a physical object, basically like a toaster; and the magical aura that we associate with it because it was hand-made by a genius is a bit of a joke. They played with use-value, market-value, authenticity, creativity, originality, fame, and mechanical reproduction. I think their points, having been made, can now be pretty much left behind. Beautifully crafted individual objects remain worth making and appreciating. But if you’re going to collect Warhols, I don’t think you can be too upset if some officials dispute their authenticity. This whole business requires a sense of humor.

Marc Chagall was not a major artist, in my opinion. He was a decorative illustrator who developed a distinctive and memorable overall style without producing any particularly memorable works. As Richard Dorment wrote recently in the New York Review, we value Chagall mainly for what he remembered and depicted. He painted nostalgic fantasies of the Eastern European Jewish world that was ruthlessly destroyed–along with almost all of its people–during his lifetime. In my view, Chagall’s art, his biography, and the cataclysm around him combine to make something worthy of space on museum walls.

The irony is that Chagall–a poor kid from a provincial backwater–had the privilege of joining two sophisticated modernist movements: Cubism in Paris and then Suprematism in Moscow. (The Suprematists are most famous for Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Quadrilateral on White,” the first completely abstract painting.)

The Cubists and the Suprematists were committed to the great modernist project of transcending arbitrariness. When a traditional painter used a Renaissance style to depict the Virgin Mary in order to illustrate Catholic ideas, the modernist saw layers of arbitrariness. They asked: Why Mary? Why Catholicism? Why a vanishing point in the middle of the rectangular canvass? None of these questions had answers that would really count unless one belonged to the culture of the artist, sharing his biases and beliefs. One could appreciate such art from a cultural distance–but only because of its emotion and its form. So why not strip art down to those two essentials? Malevich wrote: “Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of ‘things.’ … The new art of Suprematism … has produced new forms and form relationships by giving external expression to pictorial feeling.”

Chagall didn’t paint that way, and it is possible that he did not even understand these ideas. Maybe he would fail an art history exam about the work of the masters whom he knew personally. Richard Dorment says so: “And just as he had assimilated Cubist form without, I think, necessarily understanding it, so now he appropriated Suprematist style without having the slightest idea that for Malevich abstraction was a means toward the elimination of the self in order to achieve a higher level of spiritual experience. Chagall wasn’t an explorer and he wasn’t an intellectual.”

Right, but he was a witness with a memory, and we can appreciate his painted memoirs for what they depict. Meanwhile, Malevich is not interesting or important because of his monochrome rectangles. He is important because he created them, along with radical manifestos, on the eve of the Soviet Revolution. In other words, his pictures belong to an interesting story that also involves his biography and the historical context. If all art–including High Modernism–is contextual, contingent, embedded, narrative, immanent, and local–then it’s hardly an accusation to say that Chagall illustrated his own past. Malevich did the same thing, unwittingly. He illustrated the moment of revolutionary ferment around 1914. The question is the quality of Chagall’s illustrations (and about that, I must say I have mixed feelings).