I don't entirely agree with your conclusion. Of course I understand that artists need to pay their bills. I'm an artist myself, and I'm well aware that recognition doesn't put food on the table, but I think you're reducing a much broader social phenomenon to financial desperation. Not everyone participating in this circus is a struggling artist trying to survive. There are collectors, traders, people with established careers and others who have absolutely nothing to sell. They're participating too. So what explains their behavior? And there's something else. If an artist's best chance of paying next month's rent depends on making a wealthy stranger feel important on social media, what does that tell us about the market we've built? I find it disturbing that we've reached a point where this behavior can be defended as a rational economic strategy rather than questioned as a symptom of something deeply dysfunctional. And I think we need to be very careful about using poverty to explain away every behavior, because that risks turning artists into people who supposedly have no agency or responsibility for their own choices. Financial pressure explains a lot. But it doesn't explain everything. And if your analysis of the numbers is right, perhaps the most revealing question isn't why so many people respond to a wealthy collector, but why we've created an environment where generating attention for someone else's wealth can seem more rewarding than creating art itself.