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).

I’ve taken a break recently from War and Peace (which is heavy to carry on planes), to read the much slimmer war novel City of Fear by Ward Just. This was my third Just novel, the others being Echo House and Forgetfulness. These three excellent books share some common themes. Just’s big story is the evolution of official Washington from Kennedy’s Camelot to the Reagan Era. The capital changes from a Cold War city–whose leaders were morally troubling but tough, ideological men on the federal payroll as soldiers, politicians, and spies–into a city of fixers: corporate lawyers who instead of litigating make phone calls and pull strings on behalf of clients. The main decline takes place during the Vietnam War, which Just covered and which is clearly a moral linchpin for him. Often the shift occurs within families, creating tensions between Cold-Warrior fathers and fixer sons. The fathers have Midwestern roots, usually in industrial Wisconsin or Downstate Illinois. The Midwest stands for America, in contrast to the “federal city”–which, however, Just evidently loves. Certain parts of DC receive particularly affectionate attention in his pages, especially a corner of Georgetown north of Q and east of Wisconsin that becomes a lofty refuge for several of his characters. Vietnam and France, where the author lives today, also figure repeatedly.

I have emphasized the commonalities, but these are wonderfully diverse novels, each intricately constructed even though a plot summary would retell a lot less action than you’d expect in a fictional book about spies and wars. (Marriages and father/son relations are central.) The narration involves frequent flashbacks, stories within stories, and ruminations told with implied indirect discourse. Sometimes I think the structure is contrived as well as simply complex, as when a character in City of Fear looks up from a conversation to see a relevant event playing on the TV. Then again, coincidences happen–especially to people near the center of power in media-saturated environments. Events really do revolve around them.

This is a remarkable painting that I saw in the San Diego Museum of Art last week. I like it for two reasons that often seem to apply to great works.

First, it’s good in itself. If you had no idea where it came from, you might guess that it’s a nineteenth-century American work, or possibly even a contemporary painting based on a photograph. Regardless, you might appreciate the striking composition, with a few large items displayed in an asymmetrical curve before a black background–the melon slice and cucumber extending into our space. You might also admire the realism of the fruit contrasted with the almost abstract frame.

But then you find out that it was painted in 1602 by a rather mysterious figure named Juan Sanchez Cotán. Before Cotán, no one had painted fruit or other inanimate objects by themselves–only as details in larger works. Cotán painted several “still life” paintings of fruit around 1600, and then entered a Carthusian monastery where he painted only religious works until his early death. With his fruits and vegetables, Cotán launched a genre that remained very important for Dutch genre painters in the 17th century, for impressionists and post-impressionists, and then for Cubists and other high modernists. Representing vegetables on a table became a means of exploring space and light, of commenting on art, and of making subtle points about affluence and decay.

Thus Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber has qualities that you cannot infer from the image alone. For instance, we can call it “original” and “influential” because we know what comes before and after in the history of art.

Implication: If someone painted exactly the same picture today (whether or not he copied the original), it would be a different work of art with an entirely different significance from Cotán’s painting. Borges explored the same idea in “Pierre Renard, Author of the Quixote.” The fictional Renard writes passages of Don Quixote verbatim without consulting the original book, thereby creating a work that is identical to Cervantes’ masterpiece in terms of the letters on the page, but entirely different in value and purpose.

I just finished Kim, which was my favorite novel when I was 12 years old. I wanted then to be Kim, a boy spy in the Orient. Later, I would have avoided the book as imperialistic and juvenile. But a favorable word by Pankaj Mishra sent me back to it. It is a bit of a “Boy’s Own” adventure, and it is certainly imperialistic–in an interesting way. It is also finely constructed, challenging, and beautiful to read.

I was attentive to the different ways that Kipling’s characters understand or fail to understand cultures other than their own. Almost the full possible spectrum of such understanding is represented. Right at the beginning, we meet the English curator of the museum in Lahore, a man learned in the languages and religions of South Asia. He derives some of his knowledge from “books French and German, with photographs and reproductions,” drawing on the “labours of European scholars” accumulated over at least a century. (That body of work is a remarkable achievement.) But the curator also recognizes an old beggar as “no mere bead-telling mendicant, but a scholar of parts,” and engages the Lama in a respectful conversation, from which he continues to learn.

In Chapter 4, a “dark, sallowish District Superintendant of Police” speaks fluent Hindi or Urdu and wittily urges a woman to veil herself–enforcing not a British law but a local custom. She observes, “These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white woman and learning our tongues from books, are worse than pestilence.” In Chapter 11, we learn that the same policeman is actually a Government spy, “not less than the greatest” agent in the Secret Service. What makes him effective is his deep affinity for his Hindu subjects.

To control requires understanding and respect. It changes the ones who rule as well as those whom they govern. The two cultures grow more alike, either enriching or adulterating themselves (depending on your perspective and the way the merger turns out). Some Europeans in Kim do not understand this dynamic. For instance, the Rev. Bennett says, “My experience is that one can never fathom the Oriental mind.” He can’t even understand when Kim, in Urdu, calls him “the thin fool who looks like a camel.” To misunderstand is to lack control, as the Russian and French spies find to their humiliation near the end. They believe they can “deal with Orientals,” but they utterly misread the people around them.

And then there is the lama, who doesn’t wish to understand because he doesn’t want to rule. “It was noticeable that the lama never demanded any details of life at St. Xavier’s, nor showed the faintest curiosity as to the manners and customs of the Sahibs.” As a result, the Europeans affect him not at all. (Even the spectacles that the curator gives him never change the way he sees the world.)

So the imperialism that Kim describes and–presumably–celebrates is a process of careful, respectful interpretation and learning. It’s not surprising that the head of the Royal Ethnographic Survey is also the chief spy for Britain, or that an Anglified Bengali should wish to use charms and to describe them in scientific papers for the Royal Society. This “Babu” is, in fact, the perfect example of an imperialistic mix, with his invocations to Herbert Spencer as a prophet of karma, his Latin tags, and his brilliant mimicry of diverse Indians.

Kipling himself spoke Hindi before English, and his father was the curator of the Lahore Museum. So Kipling was the kind of imperialist he celebrated. What he overlooked was the economic exploitation essential to the British Raj. The British didn’t just “oversee justice”; they also made the rules to maximize their profit. The only hint of that fact in the novel is a complaint that the Babu makes when he pretends to be drunk in order to manipulate enemy spies. He is actually a British spy, despised in all his disguises. Yet perhaps Kipling faintly understands that the Babu’s complaint is just.

For better and for worse, the United States has never produced many people who yearn to understand, love, and control foreign countries. We intervene often enough, but we tend to beat a quick retreat when we find distant lands impossible to understand or to master. There have been fine American scholars of distant cultures; but they are rarely the same Americans who have invaded and governed such places. Today, after the new Counterinsurgency Manual and the shift in US tactics, American soldiers are busy learning Arabic and Pashto. I am not sure that their knowledge will last or accumulate, nor that it is motivated by the kind of love, affinity, and urge to possess that was so common among Anglo-Indians. I suppose the strongest example of real American “imperialism” is domestic; white Americans have periodically immersed themselves in minority cultures and have thereby helped to change and control them.