To be accurately taxed, an artwork needs to be accurately valued, and the owner who has to pay the tax can’t be expected to provide the last word. When an artwork is sold outright, the Internal Revenue Service needs no help in determining how much to tax; it has the purchase price and the sale price and it knows how to subtract. (The maximum federal tax rate on profits from the sale of art and collectibles is 28 percent, higher than the 15 to 20 percent for stocks.) Things get trickier, however, when an artwork passes to an heir or is given to a museum. The agency still needs to know, as of the date of death or donation, how much the art is worth, but without a current sale price that figure can be debatable.
Category: visual
If You Own A Work Of Art, Are You Allowed To Eat It?
“It’s unlikely that any serious collectors have pondered this rather Seussian question – but it did pop up on Reddit last month, and we decided to get to the bottom of it. The answer, as with most things, is: It depends.”
Why The Getty Center’s Art Was Safest Inside The Getty, No Matter How Close The Fires Got
“Visitors come to the Getty Center in Los Angeles to see Vincent van Gogh’s irises and other great works. What they don’t see is the reason that these masterpieces could stay put while thousands in Southern California had to evacuate as multiple fires raged in recent days, one of which came within thousands of feet of the museum. The Getty’s architect, Richard Meier, built fire resistance into the billion-dollar complex.”
The Best New Architecture Of 2017
“This was the year when postmodernism, for long derided as the gimcrack style of shyster capitalists of the 1980s, was well and truly rehabilitated. (In this it followed on the heels of brutalism, which was long derided as the inhuman style of arrogant socialists of the 1960s.) Historic England started listing postmodern works. Books were published. Playful reincarnations of the style – post-postmodernism, perhaps – appeared at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In truth, the late lamented architectural practice FAT was doing much of this before the turn of the millennium, but it takes time for the rest of the world to catch up with true visionaries.”
Is It Art Or Arson? It’s Both, And The Artist May Go To Prison For It
“[Russian photographer] Danila Tkachenko’s 2017 Motherland project documents the annihilation of villages, the plight of small farmers struggling to compete with big corporations, and ‘a state over-reliant on oil, which has shown no interest in developing agriculture’.”
Let The Berkshire Museum Sell The Paintings: Tyler Cowen
“The board of the Berkshire Museum made a decision to just shift focus [to history, natural science, and tech], not to tear up the institution and start all over again. … The sad truth is that the people running the Berkshire Museum just don’t care that much about American art any more, at least not from an institutional point of view. Given that reality, it’s actually better if they are not entrusted with important artworks.”
If You Need A Basic Primer On The Berkshire Museum Art Sale And Lawsuit, Here It Is
The AP’s Mark Pratt offers “a look at the arguments for and against, and why the case against the Berkshire Museum has aroused such anger:”
Spanish Medieval Art Pieces Caught Up In Catalonia Independence Fight
“Unrest has broken out at the Lleida Museum in western Catalonia after Spanish law enforcement officers entered the institution this morning. The move is the latest development in a long-running restitution saga centred on 44 religious artefacts housed at the museum, which have become a symbol of Catalonia’s bid for independence.”
A Problem For Museums: How Do You Keep Your Images Compelling?
Museums in the 21st century face particular and special challenges: in an age of digital communication, when an image – almost any image – can be summoned up effortlessly on an electronic device, why go to the trouble of visiting an actual institution just to see the supposed “original”? Does the word “original” have meaning any longer in this context? In other words, the mere displaying of objects, even uniquely valuable objects, no longer, of itself, justifies a museum’s existence; something more is required to render a visit to a museum worthwhile.
Do Museums Really Need Warnings For Content In Their Galleries?
Gallery information panels and texts can exert a powerful influence on how we view a work. Do we really need to be told that something could cause offence or disturb? Do we need to be protected from our own potential feelings?