Campbell's soup can still make money, right?

From the BBC: "The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that only artworks the artist was directly involved in producing can be considered a Warhol original, according to reports in the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph in the UK."

Baudrillard on Warhol: "Modern art had already gone a very long way in the deconstruction of its object, but it was Warhol who went furthest in the deconstruction of the subject of art, in the destruction of the artist. It was he who went furthest in the disinvestment of the creative act. One could say that this is his snobbery, but a snobbery that relieves us of all the affectation of art -- precisely because he is machinic."

Later in Baudrillard's The Plastic Inevitable: "Behind this machinic snobbery, what actually is happening is a rise in power, a potentialization of the object, image, sign and simulacrum. A rise in power of value, for which the finest example is the art market itself. In this market sphere we are far from the alienation of the price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the fetishism of value, which explodes the very notion of the market and in the same blow destroys the work of art as such. He works towards the extermination of the real by the image, by such an overbidding of the image that it puts an end to all aesthetic value. In this sense it is impossible to say, like H. Obalk, that Warhol is not a great artist. Fortunately, he's not an artist at all. Quite the contrary: at stake in his work is an anthropological challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics."

Later in the BBC piece: "The collectors believe the board are deliberately refusing to verify the works in an attempt to keep prices high, reports the Telegraph."

And from Andy Warhol: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

And a bit of trivia: After Warhol died of heart failure in 1987, Sotheby's auctioned a Warhol android prototype that Warhol was developing to appear in his place on TV talk shows.