Conceptual, language-based artists dedicated to the slippery semantics of the open text are particularly ill-served by the museum retrospective. When their work is shown en masse, it tends to be circumscribed by a confining second and third order of denotation, that of naturalizing museum discourse itself. This was particularly true of Vernon Fisher’s long-awaited but ultimately disappointing mid-career retrospective. The exhibition placed Fisher within the familiar image-as-text, text-as-image lineage, with its predictably dysfunctional rhetoric of arbitrary cultural codes and destabilized