Reducing VAT on works: the art world's crocodile tears

The failure to decrease VAT is certainly a problem for the Italian art market, which is losing competitiveness with galleries from France, Germany and around the world. But this is not the pincer that suffocates the art market, especially if we think about contemporary art. Why does no one protest, for example, about the conditions of artists who live a completely deregulated role, with no legal status, no rights and no political recognition? The 22 percent VAT is a problem, but the real problem lies in that “hundred.” In other words, the total absence of critical confrontation has created a system of speculation where that “hundred” has been inflated by arbitrary values determined by public relations doping. After many years, this speculative system is destined to burst, and here are the collectors of contemporary art who are at a standstill and are no longer willing to buy works worth 10-20-30-50 thousand euros when these works are worth one-fifth, if not less.

With the failure to decrease VAT, the government is being blamed for the market crisis, but it is not! The big problem is values, and therefore prices, which have been inflated for years without any critical basis. When, on the other hand, criticism could revitalize the education of artists (totally prone in rigid and nostalgic postures) and popularization could be a space of opportunity to interest and enthuse the public and collectors. Those in Italy who have attempted to stimulate such critical confrontation in the past fifteen years have been excluded, ostracized, marginalized and professionally killed. Now the system comes to tell us that the crisis of the system is due to VAT, when in fact its failure to decrease is only an aggravating factor on a situation that was already one of deep crisis.

Young artists, medium and small galleries, today stand only thanks to the “Grandparents Parents Foundation” and the possibility for some artists to teach in the academy. These problems were raised by yours truly sixteen years ago in the main national newspapers in the field, I spoke in 2009 about a P-ART-MALAT case, where works are inflated with arbitrary values like the securities of the Parmalat savers defrauded. Today those problems have escalated and degenerated. Little count the crocodile tears. The contemporary collectors who felt cheated will never protest lest they feel stupid, lest their social status be diminished, and lest the contemporary works they bought at inflated prices be further depreciated. Their protest is silent: it lies in not buying more contemporary works, and concentrating, if anything, their purchases on the modern, which today is eating away at the contemporary.

I remind you, because it is not clear for many: it is the artists who should make works for the growth of the market. Quality works for which it is justified to demand money for them. We are substituting for works the profile of the curators, the narcissism of the directors, the reels on Instagram, the lists of 300 artists at the various Biennales, the white beard of Bonami and Pistoletto, things that are also interesting but that should be at the margin. This critical and qualitative problem must necessarily come before issues concerning the VAT rate.

Today, the role of the artist is completely at the mercy of the call of the gallery or curator. A call that often depends on friendship rather than merit issues. When collaborating with a gallery, it withholds half the price of the work, if not more. This also makes “Research and Development” practically impossible, with works that on the one hand must be immediately recognizable and therefore immediately sellable, and on the other hand do not allow the artist sufficient earnings to survive on his or her work. This obsession with the market, with “collecting,” without providing for moments of research and seeding, returns very weak works and artists when they should be at the center of the art system. Moreover, to gain access to contemporary galleries today you have to compulsorily develop derivative languages and thus ape modern artists. Artists today seem like those pieceworkers who in neorealist films went in front of factories in the morning hoping to be called, and always willing to work for one euro less, in a bidding war where no one wins. Why is no one protesting these hallucinating conditions?

Before the problems related to VAT there is another problem: the fact that for fifteen, twenty years contemporary art has not produced real values, forcing the system to use the doping of public relations, and thus to inflate contemporary works with arbitrary values, a situation that thus ends up polluting the future market. This is due to the fact that there is no longer any critical system, no critical confrontation, in a world where art curators think mainly of their own careers and have completely abdicated the ability to publicly argue lights and shadows of artworks. Indeed, criticism might have the consequence of antagonizing someone and thus diminishing one’s career chances in a precarious system with very few opportunities for everyone.

Instead, criticism should go to stimulate and nurture the formative phase of artists and, at the same time, create a space of opportunity for the public and collectors to become passionate about the contemporary. This has not been happening for years, and today we are reaping the fruits of this aridity, which we can see reflected in biennials, exhibitions and fairs. For so many years we have been proceeding in a desert in which it is also becoming difficult to recognize (and thus protect) quality. The problem of VAT is certainly there, but it is secondary to the quality of the products being offered, which in 95 percent of cases are furniture solutions that we might find at IKEA, but which in the art world also become pretentious and unnecessarily expensive.

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