The title curator Alex Glauber bestowed on this terrific show is a line from a 1994 Phish song, “Wolfman’s Brother”:
The telephone was ringing
That’s when I handed it to Liz
She said, “This isn’t who it would be
If it wasn’t who it is”
WAS THAT REASONABLY NECESSARY? It’s a question asked every day in law schools and courthouses. Less so in MFA programs, artist studios, and museum acquisition committee meetings. Imagine counsel standing just behind Andy Warhol in the Factory, asking, “Does it need to be Brillo? What if you just did up your own soap box?” Or envision MoMA turning down a trove of Pictures generation works because legal has questions, not about provenance, but about copyright permission. We might be headed in this direction, now that the Supreme Court has injected a reasonable necessity standard into transformative