The art world is definitely a sham(1). That doesn't mean there isn't money making opportunity, nor does it mean there isn't intrinsic value in artwork; if anything it tends to mean there are outsized winners and losers that are divorced from any intrinsic value of the art.

(1)Consider all the artists "unrecognized" during their lifetime; did their genius just get discovered after their deaths? No, it was just at that point their works were a limited commodity, and not well distributed yet, and so suddenly became good places to park wealth. That isn't to say there isn't good and interesting and thought provoking work being done, but it's definitely only loosely, if at all, correlated to price. A good artist with nothing else can expect to sell a custom painting for $1k, tops. A hack artist with a known PR person in the art world can get themselves selling them for hundreds of thousands, if not millions.