Creating value for objects-in-waiting

Abstract

In much anthropological reflection on value creation through objects, value is conceptualized as created in circulation. Yet objects’ social lives are punctuated by periods of waiting as much as they are by movement. Waiting can thus be theorized and examined as a critical pause in the circulation of objects, one that enables their value transformation and creation via social actors, institutions, and valuation processes. Demonstrating this can be accomplished ethnographically by following the consignment, exhibition, and sale of a group of objects—in this case by the artist Maqbool Fida Husain via a Mumbai art gallery. As objects wait, the art world turns around them, setting valuation and other value-making processes in motion. This moment of waiting is precisely when our methodological and analytical gaze should turn to the object's social relations and to the collective activities of the art world.