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In The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers, Alison Gerber follows in the footsteps of Viviana Zelizer and other economic sociologists who have shown that love and money are not fundamentally hostile to one another, but are regularly intertwined in social interactions. Valuation has become a central topic within sociology in recent decades. Sociologists studying valuation have often taken cultural products, such as wine, fashion, and music, as their objects of study, because the economic value and aesthetic quality of these goods are highly uncertain. Gerber aptly explores the field of visual art. However, she departs from her predecessors by examining the valuation of practices, rather than the valuation of products. She focuses not on how people settle on the prices of objects, but on how people account for the value of the work they do. In this case, the work is the physical process of making art and its …