The Geneva Free Port is crammed with storage vaults that contain great art
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We don't really know how many more samples of that script are tucked away in vaults. In that context in don't care about a 1000 Picasso paintings. I would love for people to go crazy about the paintings, so long as they leave the truly old pieces to the researchers and in the ground until they can be excavated properly.
Besides, not everything old is necessarily worth preserving.
You don't always need a physical object, you can take high-res scans or pictures.
Many pieces of privately-owned art are actually on long-term loans to museums.
Public museums usually have far larger stockpiles of objects than can reasonably be displayed. Many languish in storage for decades at a time. In private ownership they can at least be displayed and taken care of.
Antiquities don't have a lot of intrinsic value beyond display, so eventually (maybe 50 years, maybe 200 years) they will all end up in a museum. Generally they have higher value to people in the area from which they originated, so they will eventually migrate home. I'd prefer to be patient and let it happen naturally instead of implementing new laws.
... I feel like this is a good example of where they will eventually migrate home. It hasn't been very long, on an antiquities scale.
The default is allowed, not disallowed.
the best solution that honors private property rights is to make part of the requirement of long term storage sites like this is to present high resolution scans of the artwork that would be freely available.
Some bemoan all this art being locked up out of private view, yet many government managed museums and the like are just as bad if not worse as I doubt an investor would let their collections suffer from neglect.
and
Despite enhanced Swiss efforts to track inventory and ownership, the free ports there remain an opaque preserve (though more transparent these days than counterparts in places like Singapore), filled with objects whose ownership can be confoundingly convoluted.
You keep it there until the value appreciates substantially, the item can stay there are long as you need it to. As the article mentions, the problem with these warehouses has been that there's been very little visibility of what is actually being stored as they become black holes into which these treasures disappear. I suspect many of these objects aren't directly owned by the super-rich individuals themselves, but are owned by offshore companies with hugely obfuscated paper trails that detach any tax liability from their human owners.
Also:
Collectors and dealers choose to store art in the free ports for more pedestrian reasons than tax avoidance. Some simply have no more room in their homes, said Georgina Hepburne Scott, who advises collectors. And in a free port, their property is protected in climate-controlled environments, often under video surveillance and behind fire-resistant walls.
No, when importing the piece of art to its destination, VAT tax apply on its current value at the current VAT rate. So the opposite happens. Instead of eroding over time, the tax bill gets larger as tax rates are likely to climb and the value increase.
However, a good reason to do so is if your liquidity is limited. For example, if you e.g. as a German inherited a 100 million EUR piece of art stored in a free port today, bringing it to Germany would cost you 19 million in VAT. Assuming that you don't have that much cash laying around, you would face the choice of selling it or just keeping it there for a few more years.
2. These items are often held as an investment, i.e. buy for $20mm and sell five years later for $25mm.
3. If you only care about the capital gain on the art (and not about what is actually on the canvas), you don't want to pay the VAT rate, because that's (often) not recoverable.
4. You can probably get a $10-15mm loan against a $20mm painting. If you can sell that $20mm painting for $25mm in five years, with $5m equity down, you will have doubled your money. That's an 18-20% annual return (after deducting interest expenses).
Which raises the question - if one cannot discern a difference, is there a difference? And if there is no difference, why pay those fantastic prices? I wonder when the modern "tulip" madness will come crashing down.
I wouldn't mind decorating my house with cheap forgeries that are so good one cannot tell with the unaided eye.
Probably won't. Artworks with provenance are like bitcoin 'avant la lettre' - pointlessly expensive manufactured things in limited supply which are trackable/traceable to a certain point (not too much, not too little ...)
"How convenient!"
So what if the Incan built a gold statue? We can built them much better today!
I guess we know what people will be doing for money when jobs are gone due to automation.
Rather than advocating against "evil superrich" we should focus on digitization. It should be a law that any piece sold, insured or stored has to digitized in high resolution.
Governments already demand that you give up your intellectual property after a number of years, yet the same concept hasn't been applied to physical property yet.
But as painful as it would be to lose it, if you had verifiable proof that the documents the code is printed on were legally yours, you shouldn't be obligated by outside parties to handle them in any particular way.
You give that example of hyperbole, but I believe that is quite reasonable. I am of the opinion that if you want your code to have copyright protection, you must have a copy of the source code either available to the public or placed in an escrow service to be made public when the copyright expires.
Copyright is an agreement between authors and society. In exchange for limited protection of the work, the work is not hidden from the public, and can therefore be built upon once the work is in public domain. If the author is not allowing the work to eventually enter the public domain, then the author's side of the agreement is not being upheld, and they should not have copyright protection either.
With code, "[..]sold, insured or stored[...]" are the three verbs under consideration. Selling and insuring likely require somebody to look at it, so copyright is somewhat relevant(although you can make them sign an NDA). But that "stored" verb would mean that writing code for your personal or company use with no intention to ever show it to the public is also illegal. So you wouldn't just waive some benefits, but would be fined or jailed if you don't file a copy with the government.
Indeed.
"At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 24 of 1,221 works by Pablo Picasso in the institution’s permanent collection can currently be seen by visitors. Just one of California conceptual artist Ed Ruscha’s 145 pieces is on view. Surrealist Joan Miró? Nine out of 156 works. ... The vast majority of art belonging to the world’s top art institutions (and in many countries, their taxpayers) is at any time hidden from public view in temperature-controlled, darkened, and meticulously organised storage facilities. Overall percentages paint an even more dramatic picture: the Tate shows about 20% of its permanent collection. The Louvre shows 8%, the Guggenheim a lowly 3%..."
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150123-7-masterpieces-you...
At best, they are avoiding taxes with the art. At worst, they are laundering money or hiding treasures plundered from places like Iraq behind a curtain of shell companies and noxious Swiss regulations.
I know in Moscow there is an interesting museum called the Pushkin museum which mostly consists of replicas of the worlds famous art. It was actually kinda enjoyable having for instance all the renaissance sculptures of note in one place
They should keep helping people avoid taxes as this is the right thing to do. Tax is unethical by its very nature (it is theft, regardless of justifications).
That said, they could very well facilitate a tax-free art gallery environment trying to build mecas of fine art galleries.
This is incorrect. Taxation is neither unethical, nor "theft".
No one survives long under natural law.
Seriously, how can you say that comments about taxation are off-topic while this article is not off-topic and is currently on the front page? You can't really have a conversation about poverty, welfare and related policies without talking about taxation, and it's a weird moderatorial distinction.