Far be it from me to police what a gallery chooses to exhibit, but it seems to me that making an exhibition-of-photocopied-reproductions-as-homage in the spirit of one artist—an exhibition that leads even the Times to wonder if the artist is involved—is one thing. It is far different, and less malicious, than re-creating the artworks of an elusive artist, no matter how poorly and with how much transparency. As someone said last night at dinner, "This show cannot even begin to look like a Cady Noland show. Cady has very specific reasons for installing her objects the way she does; the relationships between them are of equal importance to the sculptures themselves. This cannot be re-created by others' hands." Hammons is enigmatic, and his relationship to exhibitions and the market can be seen, in some way, as part of his oeuvre; Noland's relationship with the art world is much closer to a categorical "no." In my mind, the differences between those stances outweigh the similarities described above.

It's telling that two of the four artists enlisted to re-create these works insist on their own anonymity. If these aren't Cady Noland sculptures, and those responsible for creating them aren't willing to claim them as something else (à la Sturtevant, or some such), then what are they? As much as I would love to see a Cady Noland exhibition, this is the wrong way to go about it, and the wrong way to "incite the public's desire and curiosity to experience the real thing." That desire is already present, at least among cognoscenti. We need instead to stoke Noland's desire to collaborate with a gallery or institution on an exhibition of her own work. This gesture harms that effort.