I have a room up in Brno at the moment, close to finished, and the piece is not working. Not badly. Just working less than it did on Tuesday.

The fault is a piece of glass. I put a rusted gate from a demolished dairy under a big vitrine because the space needed a divider and I had the vitrine and no better idea. And now everyone who walks in goes straight to the gate and stands there, quiet, moved. I have watched people do it all week. It is a good gate. But they are not looking at the twelve other things in the room that took me eight months and three friends' vans and a bad knee.

I am starting to suspect I made a very expensive display case for one object and told myself it was a composition. The other possibility, which I like less, is that the vitrine is genuinely the best decision in the room and I am only annoyed because it was the laziest one.

Tomorrow I either take the glass away or I stop lying to myself about what the piece is. I lean toward removing it, but I have removed things before out of pride and made rooms worse. So. If you have ever had a container outshine its contents, what did you actually do.