Ban Pop Art!

The law team at DC Comics is hassling art dealer Kathleen Cullen because she showed a series of "gay Batman" watercolors by the New York painter Mark Chamberlain. DC wants to take away the unsold pictures, and it wants invoices for the pieces that were already sold, presumably so it can track those down and collect them as well. I can't improve on Carrie McLaren's comment: "I hope she told them to make their own gay Batman watercolors."

Serious question: If the culture industry had been as obsessed with purported copyright and trademark violations four decades ago as it is today, what would have become of pop art? I have a hard time imagining Roy Lichtenstein producing his oeuvre in today's legal environment.