On Halloween week, an op-ed titled “On Halloween, afterlife of a ghost dance” landed like a seasonal reminder that symbols don’t die so much as recur, rebranded and revalued with each return [8]. In the same cultural breath, the official posters for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics were unveiled, a ritual that fuses civic pride with the machinery of merchandising and myth-making [7]. And far from the trading floor, a look at what remains of Montreal’s Expo 67 asks the harsher question: after the spectacle, what stays, and who benefits [9]? These moments together form a séance of sorts, summoning the spirits that haunt artistic value: speculation, publicity, and the quieter pulse of public meaning. Today, I want to test the market’s mirror—how price chases attention—and sketch practical ways to align valuation with cultural enrichment.
The phrase “afterlife of a ghost dance” lingers because markets excel at raising the dead. A trend that should pass is revived by liquidity, cloaked in novelty, and priced like prophecy. Halloween merely makes the ritual visible, but the conjuring happens year-round, in press releases that double as price signals and in auctions that treat attention as intrinsic worth. My lens is simple: does money amplify a work’s public resonance, or does it merely amplify itself?
Value, if it is to mean more than momentum, must outlive the hype that minted it. Consider the newly unveiled official posters for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, icons destined for dorm walls, subway kiosks, and brand decks alike [1]. Such unveilings reliably ignite cycles of commentary and commerce, where design language becomes a marketing substrate and scarcity can be simulated by timed drops or limited editions. This is not automatically a sin; civic imagery should circulate widely.
But when the headline eclipses the public’s experience, we’re left with an afterimage—bright, brief, and already priced in. The question is whether the poster accrues meaning with use, or merely with resale. Architecture offers a counterweight because it refuses to be flipped at cocktail speed. The “Vessel of Light: Carrier of Urban Perception” by Yuan Architects names its ambition plainly: to hold and transmit how a city feels, not just how it photographs [2].
Buildings absorb footsteps and seasons; their dividend is durational, measured in orientation, safety, and shared memory. When capital flows into such work, it is forced—usefully—to accept a slower return of meaning. The asset cannot be day-traded, so the public’s encounter has room to grow. History is a stern auditor of hype.
A CBC News survey asks what remains of Montreal’s Expo 67, stripping the world’s-fair euphoria down to its surviving bones [3]. The answers, by implication, test our accounting: which structures earned their keep in lived culture, and which were mere pageantry? Here the market’s favorite metric—velocity—falters, because resonance accrues slowly and unevenly. It is easier to price a headline than a habit, but only the latter endures.
Environmental research provides an uncomfortable parable: plastic packaging may be a greater sin than the food waste it is supposed to prevent [4][5]. In cultural markets, we practice a similar theater of protection—overwrapping work in speculative sheen while underinvesting in the nutrient that sustains it: access, pedagogy, and care. Packaging flatters; nourishment changes lives. If we priced the externalities of cultural “waste”—performative launches, disposable collabs, algorithmic churn—the ledger might look different.
The problem is not visibility per se, but substitution: spectacle where stewardship belongs. Taste, when practiced patiently, resists the algorithm’s accelerant. Even a lifestyle feature about searching for the perfect Thanksgiving cocktail reads as a defense of deliberation: iteration, restraint, and balance over novelty-for-novelty’s-sake [6]. That posture is instructive for valuation: an audience taught to savor will reward depth, not just dazzle.
Markets, of course, prefer immediate feedback loops, but they can be rewired to privilege endurance. Craft, like culture, is a time art; its value is legible only after the third sip, the second visit, the century mark. So how do we tune price to public enrichment rather than public relations? Start by building cultural life-cycle assessments that mirror environmental ones, rewarding works and projects that demonstrably expand access, education, and long-term maintenance—an accounting spirit consonant with research that challenges our faith in glossy packaging [4][5].
Auction houses and platforms could allocate a standing public-interest reserve from premiums to fund conservation, open licensing for educators, and free entry windows tied to each high-profile sale. Resale royalties should be paired with “resonance dividends” for institutions that exhibit and care for works, measured by attendance, curricular use, and geographic reach. If Halloween reminds us that markets can animate ghosts, the corrective is simple: embed living benefits into the contract, so every price summons a public good that refuses to fade.
Sources
- The Official Posters of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics Have Been Unveiled (Printmag.com, 2025-10-28T17:00:00Z)
- The Vessel of Light: Carrier of Urban Perception by Yuan Architects (Archinect, 2025-10-29T15:53:00Z)
- What’s left of Montreal’s Expo 67? A look at the remnants of a world’s fair (CBC News, 2025-10-25T08:00:00Z)
- Plastic packaging could be a greater sin than food waste (Phys.Org, 2025-10-30T16:50:04Z)
- Plastic packaging could be a greater sin than food waste (The Conversation Africa, 2025-10-30T13:53:41Z)
- In Search of the Perfect Thanksgiving Cocktail (Imbibemagazine.com, 2025-10-28T19:08:52Z)
