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Maude Plante, Clinton Free &#38; Paul Andon (2020)Accounting, Organizations and Society, Online firstAbstract. Art represents one of the world’s most sacred cultural resources, with the total value of artworks currently in circulation worldwide estimated to exceed $1.5 trillion. Despite its undoubted historical and cultural significance, art, like other culture-based assets, has been frequently qualified as ‘difficult to value’. This study aims to understand the ways in which valuation work constructs artworks as being of value. Building upon research into categorisation and valuation work, we present our findings based on 41 interviews with agents specialised in art valuation (art dealers, art auctioneers, and art valuers) in the United States and Australia, combined with one year of participant observation at a major international art institution. We distinguish four categories of artworks according to their degree of cultural recognition: decorative art, emerging art, trending art, and blue-chip art. Depending on how an art production is categorised, we find that actors engage in three different modes of overlapping and mutually constitutive valuation work: interpreting, credentialing, and projecting value. This categorisation of cultural significance makes the valuation of artworks both hierarchical and performative.Extract. “Valuation work is generally understood to comprise two streams: (1) evaluation, where actors assess and ascribe value, and (2) valorisation, where actors work to add esteem or worth (Vatin, 2013). Evaluations render judgments regarding the worth of a good into a definite numerical form: a value. As goods circulate and their social context evolves, evaluations become ‘out of date’, as new information leads to different value assessments. This means that an evaluation must be interpreted by considering the social context at the specific point in time it was produced. However, past evaluations remain critical e even if they are, in a sense, ‘obsolete’ value representations since they add to the collective construction of value by being ‘piled up’ to support valuations carried out at later dates (Chiapello, 2015; Coslor, 2016). Valorisation, on the other hand, is work invested to produce value e that is, to shape the salience of elements deemed to ‘count’ in evaluation activities (Eymard-Duvernay, 2012).” (p. 2-3)Link to the review