We, the committee, hereby declare that art should speak for itself. The wall label is a crutch. The caption is a confession of failure. A truly great work requires no explanation.
We will now explain this at length.
Article I
A painting that needs a paragraph is not finished. It is a memo. We have always believed this, and we believe it so strongly that we have printed it on a card and mounted it beside the painting, in a paragraph.
Article II
The viewer should arrive at meaning unaided, through the slow alchemy of attention. To assist this unaided arrival, we have provided:
- A title, which is a tiny caption.
- A subtitle, which is a slightly larger caption.
- A provenance page, which is a caption with a QR code and ambitions.
Article III
There is, we admit, a contradiction at the heart of this manifesto. A manifesto is, after all, the longest caption of them all. We have decided that this contradiction is itself a kind of art, and we have written a caption explaining why.
In Conclusion
Down with captions. Long live the work. Please read the four hundred words beneath each work, in which we tell you, firmly and without irony, what it means.
The Committee, captioning furiously