The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. was a private corporation that certified the authenticity of works by the artist, Andy Warhol, from 1995 to early 2012.
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History
The organization was created in 1995 in association with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The Board, based in New York City, consisted of six members, including art historians and curators and those who personally knew Warhol and his work, and met three times a year to examine works. Appraisals took one month and ARTnews reported that around 10 to 20% of submitted works were 'considered questionable. They did not appraise works' value. The Board did not discuss how they operated, citing privacy concerns.
Early board members included American art curator David Whitney (who died in 2005) and Warhol's friend, designer Jed Johnson who was killed in the TWA Flight 800 explosion in 1996.
The Board received criticism for its operating methods, which differed from other authentication boards, and its seeming arbitrariness in judging whether or not a work was an authentic Warhol (though, given Warhol's working methods, what constitutes an actual work by Warhol can be open for debate). Specific controversies involved 'Brillo boxes' produced after Warhol's death and a 1964 silkscreen self-portrait.
The controversy over the Board's decision-making was the subject of a November 2003 feature in Vanity Fair (magazine) by Michael Shnayerson. Shnayerson quotes art dealer John Woodward's opinion that Warhol is 'the most faked' artist in America and writes 'Often, as a result, the Warhol board is simply blamed as the messenger of bad news to hoodwinked buyers'.
Dissolution
On the day of October 19, 2011, in a statement by the Board of Directors of the Andy Warhol Foundation, it was announced that the Authentication Board was to be completely dissolved in early 2012 in order to maximize its charitable contributions to the arts.
The Foundation will continue to work on Warhol's catalogue raisonné. In 2011, Foundation President Joel Wachs said 'The catalogue raisonné serves a non-market purpose: Andy’s legacy and Warhol scholarship' and while researchers will review requests for artworks to be included in the catalogue they 'will do so in their own time'.
Speaking to The New York Observer in April, 2014, Wachs elaborated on the reasons for the Board's dissolution, saying the Board was faced with legal action '10 or so times' in its 15 years of operation, and while they 'won every single one of those lawsuits, [...] the process was extraordinarily expensive, costing us at least $10 million defending ourselves. Eventually, we decided that we wanted our money to go to artists and not to lawyers'.
Following similar dissolutions of authentication boards for Keith Harring, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the New York State Legislature passed a bill in May, 2014, that will 'make lawsuits against art authenticators more difficult to win and to punish “nuisance” lawsuits'.