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.

That’s India!  Preservationists, architecture lovers, and those with common sense around the world are growing concerned that Chandigarh, the capitol city of Punjab designed by Le Corbusier and Matthew Nowicki, is being sold off and hauled off bit by bit.  Unlike New York City, where it’s impossible to replace a stretch of sidewalk in a landmark neighborhood without layers of administrative approval, the architecture of Chandigarh is under no legal protection.  So original furniture, archival drawings, and custom-designed fixtures, are being sold off by by unscrupulous individuals without the government’s consent.

There’s a campaign to have the city designated, correctly and belatedly, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  True to form, “The campaigners believe that strong statements of international concern may succeed where local outcry has not."  Buildings and cities change over time, and part of living in them and loving them is understanding that they’ll be weathered, broken, renovated, and, yes, vandalized.  Rather than chastising Indians for not guarding their treasures, we might take down the American dealers and buyers who are profiting from the sale and resale of objects that don’t really belong to them at all.