An Andy Warhol painting, a 1963 four-pane acrylic silkscreen self-portrait called, deliciously, “Self-Portrait,” just sold for 38.4 million dollars to a private collector at Christie’s.  The media is shocked by the vast sum of money.  What shocks me is how banal the work really is.  It looks like a contemporary illustration accompanying a magazine piece about the artist.  Here Warhol is rendering photo-booth shots of himself that don’t have the canonical pop that his shots of Marilyn and Liz have, and he’s using four different shots, blunting the power of the repetition.  Even his “Flowers,” completed at the same time, and so entirely and self-consciously superficial, have a stronger graphic sense.

This painting doesn’t seem like product, like so much later Warhol does, but it seems wrong.  I don’t question the attribution.  Like other artists Andy Warhol made mistakes, and made paintings that didn’t really work but were essential to get to other, better paintings.  But I question how a painting like this prompted a bidding war.  It certainly wasn’t about the work.