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.

This article explores how valuers construct value opinions. Although some implications of outsourcing valuation to valuers for accounting purposes have been highlighted in the literature, we add a valuer perspective complementing the accountant's standpoint in order to obtain a fuller picture of these ramifications. Drawing on 62 interviews, we study the role of judgment in valuation and find that judgment is largely tied with the sensemaking of valuers. By examining the valuation activities of art and real estate valuers, we show that these specialized valuers follow a similar valuation process which allows them to grasp how to go on with valuation . This four‐phase process starts and ends by situating the opinion in its specific valuation context and is centered on iterations between researching, analyzing, and relativizing comparable data that may be adjusted to connect with a sense of what the value should be. Overall, judgment is shown to be enacted based on a practical sense of conducting valuation that includes a “gut feeling” of what represents a plausible value. This study suggests that the valuer's input should be recognized as situated, sense‐contingent, and vulnerable to the underlying politics and risks tied to providing an opinion. Our results also point to stark differences between how valuers approach the use of judgment compared to how judgment is typically exercised by accounting specialists.