They said no, of course. You cannot put a photograph of rotten floorboards on the front of a poster, people will think the building is falling down.

Which it is, a little. That is the piece.

So the poster has a nice wide shot of the whole room, everything lit evenly, you can see the arc of it, very impressive, and nobody walks in ready for the smell. The smell is half the work. Wet plaster and old wool and something I have never identified, from a mattress I took out of a skip in Žižkov in 2019. Visitors come in, they get the smell, and then they stand there for a while doing the arithmetic of what they are standing in.

My point is not that marketing people are philistines. Half of them are better at reading a room than the curators. My point is that the thing that actually pulls someone off the street is almost never the thing that fits on the poster. It is the detail that sounds like a mistake.

I have started keeping a folder. Every time someone photographs something small in one of my rooms and ignores the big obvious sculpture, I keep that photo. The rotted floor gets more phone time than the commissioned bronze. I do not know what to do with this information yet. I suspect it means the poster should be a close-up of something broken and the room should be discovered. The gallery will fight me. We will compromise, and the compromise will be worse than either idea, as usual.