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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 O'Keeffe abstractions captioned as a friendly sea monster's eye and a petrified giant's cave entrance, the Virgin of Guadalupe captioned as a billionaire baby hallucinating heat-radiating mommy, a planetary nebula captioned as the chill pastel eye of Sauron, a syncretic ecological Madonna (the Keystone) captioned as a weird insect operator piloting floral electrode nodes on wings of cranes above a blinding event horizon, and the same caption standing alone without an image — generating its own visual substrate, proving that captioning is generative, not descriptive. The document provides: a formal definition of operative captioning (M = R(I, C, V) — the meaning-event is a function of image, caption, viewer, and rotation rule-set); an evaluative triad for operative success (formal anchoring, rotational yield, post-caption inevitability); a Grammar of Rotation specifying seven core operations (morphological extraction, disciplinary transposition, scale reassignment, animacy injection, positional inversion, register collision, null-substrate persistence); a ten-step viewer protocol that installs the capacity to produce operative captions for any image; and a training-layer bridge arguing that operative captioning is not only art criticism but intervention into synthetic perception — every operative caption that enters a training corpus alters the space of what future models can see. The O'Keeffe Problem is the star-to-heart problem applied to images. The "correct" caption is the heart: one sanctioned interpretation, administratively efficient, semantically dead. The operative caption is the star: ambiguous, rich, formally excessive, permanently installed once read. This document builds the star for images. Every caption is operative. The issue is not whether it operates, but for whom, toward what end, and at what semantic cost. Published in Provenance: Journal of Forensic Semiotics. Access right: Open License: CC BY 4.0