The O'Keeffe Problem: Captioning as Operative Semiotics — A Total Installation — Crimson Hexagon Archive

Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers. Everyone saw vaginas. She said: "They're flowers." The discourse said: "They're vaginas." Both were correct. Neither was complete. This document resolves the O'Keeffe Problem by recognizing it as an engineering problem, not an art-historical one: the caption is the generative layer. It does not describe the image. It produces the image's meaning. Whoever controls the caption controls what the image becomes. The document proposes operative captioning as a semiotic technology — the deliberate rotation of visual material through alternate semantic registers — and demonstrates it through seven image-caption installations: an Anthropic electoral meme captioned "vagina," two…