Jeff Koons's "Hanging Heart (Magenta and Gold)" (1994–2006), for sale at Sotheby's on November 14, gets an assist from some friends.

Courtesy Ronnie Cutrone Studio

Rarely seen Polaroids that Andy Warhol and his assistant Ronnie Cutrone took of each other between 1977 and '79. There are few photos of the two together, as one was always behind the camera, Cutrone explains.

Christopher Wool Damien Hirst Sol LeWitt Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Joel Shapiro Francis Bacon

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Jeff Koons has 87 of them laboring in shifts. Damien Hirst employs several teams, as needed. Jasper Johns has had the same one for 23 years, and Kiki Smith’s accompanies her everywhere. Yet John Currin can hardly stand the idea. A studio assistant? “I’m a terrible coworker,” he says. He prefers to go it alone.

Most artists today depend on at least one extra hand to keep their studios in order and help prime their creative pumps. That could mean anything from mixing paint and cleaning brushes to listening to the boss think out loud. It can also involve making the actual pieces while the artist supplies the vision—the identity for the brand, so to speak. Traditionally, a young wannabe’s best entree into the profession has been to assist an established mentor. Some parlay these jobs into big careers; others may remain in the shadows.

What is curious is how differently the market treats work done by assistants in different eras. Consider how quickly a putative Old Master painting priced in the millions is devalued should new evidence prove it to have been made by other hands. A 1995 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” explored this issue by juxtaposing pictures by the master himself with those of his disciples. His studio, it seems, was happy to employ imitators skilled enough to turn out “Rembrandts” like a machine. Still, it was relatively easy to tell genius from its reflection.

Such distinctions are not always so clear—or so necessary—in the realm of contemporary art. Paintings by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat may require authentication before sale, but no doubts about genuineness haunt artworks by living artists such as Hirst, Koons or Takashi Murakami, whose prices can be astronomical. None of them makes his own paintings or even thinks he should, not when others can do the job better. Likewise, the intense labor required to produce Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings was never entirely his own, yet no one ever said the work itself was not his creation.

It is fair to ask if the art market operates on a double standard that treats certain kinds of “assisted” works as deceptions while accepting others as unique. For an answer, says Laura Paulson, senior director for contemporary art at Christie’s New York, “we have to go back to Duchamp’s readymades and the idea of liberating the artist’s hand.”

The Duchampian notions of mechanical reproduction reached full flower in the 1960s, when artists like Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began silkscreening with helpers. “The idea of art changed to be less about individual brushstrokes and more about the image,” Paulson says. “Mechanical means expanded the artist’s product. The studio assistant, who became almost an alter ego, enabled this process.

“Look at Ronnie Cutrone and Warhol,” she continues. “Andy set up the still life. Ronnie made the photo and the screen. And this whole act has become amplified to an extraordinary level with artists like Koons and Hirst.”

Cutrone, who was Warhol’s principal painting assistant from 1972 to 1982 and has retained ownership of the photographs he took for Warhol’s paintings, describes their working relationship as almost codependent. “I was born with a duplicate color sense to Warhol’s,” Cutrone recalls. “He would say, ‘Ronnie, mix me a green.’ And I would attempt to clarify: ‘What green?’ He would say, ‘Up-front green.’ And I would know what he meant. But I wasn’t going to paint his paintings.” Warhol, he adds, painted for hours a day but also took time to experiment with new ideas—not all of which were his own.

Take the “Shadows,” the 1978 series of 102 abstract panels that Warhol called “one painting with parts.” According to Cutrone, they were his idea. “It was Andy’s dream to make abstract art, and he could do it fairly well, but people didn’t like it,” Cutrone explains. “I said, ‘Look, you’re Andy Warhol. If you want to make abstract art, you have to make something that is but isn’t: a shadow. I had this idea a long time, but I was never going to do it. So I mixed all the colors and stretched all the canvases and installed them in Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in SoHo. I wasn’t jealous. They didn’t sell.” (Seventy-two of the canvases from Freidrich’s collection are now on permanent display at Dia:Beacon, in upstate New York.)