Now Serving B47: The Month the DMV Titled My Art and Nobody Noticed (Except Everybody Noticed)

I have titled paintings things like "Grief, But Make It Lavender" and "The Weight of Unspoken Tuesdays." I once called a piece "Wet Cement" — it was not about cement. It was about my divorce. Nobody knew that. My mother thought it was about cement.

Then there was the pun era. God help us all. "A Brush With Greatness." "Oil Be Seeing You." I hung one of those in a coffee shop in Portland and a barista told me it "really tied the room together," which is the kind of compliment that makes you want to move to a different country and take up accounting.

So last spring, when I had eleven new pieces going to the Riverside Arts Market, I made an executive decision: I would not name them. Not personally, anyway. I outsourced the entire operation to the most joyless, bureaucratic, fluorescent-lit machine in the American experience — the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The Method (Such As It Was)

Here's how it worked. I went to the DMV. Not to do anything — I didn't even have a transaction. I sat in the waiting room for two hours and forty minutes with a notebook, and I harvested. I wrote down ticket numbers from the "Now Serving" display. I copied form field names off the wall placards: "Residential Address Line 2." "Proof of Residency Not Accepted." I transcribed, word for word, the motivational posters nobody has looked at since 1987. One said "DRIVE SAFELY — YOUR FAMILY IS WAITING." Another just said "SMILE!" with a clip-art sun.

Then I went home and assigned each painting its title by pulling a ticket number out of a cereal bowl, like a sane person.

The results, for the record:

• A large abstract in ochre and rust became **"Now Serving B47."
• A quiet portrait of my neighbor's dog became **"Form DL-44: Statement of Fact.
• A chaotic collage made from junk mail became **"Please Have Your Documents Ready.
• My most emotionally vulnerable piece of the year — the one I'd almost titled "Elegy for My Father" — became **"Window 3 Is Closed.

That last one hit me in a way I wasn't expecting.

What Happened at the Art Fair

I hung all eleven pieces at the market with little white label cards, same as everybody else. Museum-style. And here is the thing I cannot stop thinking about: people took the titles seriously.

When a painting says "Elegy for My Father," viewers decide within two seconds whether they feel qualified to look at it. Half of them opt out. It's a velvet rope made of vocabulary.

But "Window 3 Is Closed"? People leaned in. A woman in a Cardinals hat stood in front of it for four full minutes and then told me it reminded her of the VA hospital. A teenager photographed it. A man asked me, in complete sincerity, what the window represented — and when I said "I genuinely don't know, the DMV named it," he nodded like that was the most artistically honest answer he'd ever heard.

Bureaucratic language did something my poetry never could: it got out of the way. "Now Serving B47" is a title with no ego. It makes no claims. So viewers brought their own meaning, and their own meaning was better than mine.

A Brief History of Official Sounding Nonsense

I'm not the first person to notice this trick. During World War II, the U.S. government shipped entire units under names so bland — "Exploratory Study of Weather Conditions" — that German intelligence apparently skipped right over them. Marcel Duchamp spent his career proving that context and label can turn a urinal into the most important object in modern art. And every real estate listing in America knows that "cozy" means "small" and "charming" means "the wiring is from Nixon's first term."

We are a country trained to trust the form. The official-sounding label bypasses our defenses. We read "Form DL-44: Statement of Fact" next to a dog portrait and assume there's a reason — some system, some logic, some adult in the room. There isn't. There's a cereal bowl and a two-hour wait in a folding chair.

The Aftermath

Nine of the eleven pieces sold. That's a record for me by a factor of roughly nine. Two buyers asked if I'd "do a whole series in this style." I have. I'm going back next month, and this time I'm sitting near the driving test scheduling desk, because I have a feeling the phrase "Behind-the-Wheel Examination" is about to name something really special.

Was it a gimmick? Absolutely. But here's my honest takeaway: every title I ever wrote myself was me standing in front of the painting, telling you what to feel. The DMV titles just handed you the ticket and pointed at the window.

Turns out people would rather look for themselves.

Now serving B48.