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.