A friend sent me this article from the New York Times yesterday, One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections Hides Behind This Fence: The superrich have stashed millions of works in tax-free storage. So what does that mean for the art? It inspired me to come out of hiatus and write something for a blog. The article was about Free Port Storage and the ultra-rich 1% who use them to hold art and probably illegally acquired antiquities, say from the Drone Zones of the Middle East, for deep capture and asset appreciation purposes. After finishing the article I felt as if I had seen the long view of where this Civilization is headed and the distant end point of that vision was dark, very dark indeed.

What is a Freeport?
From another article in the Economist, a good description

The world’s rich are increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and “freeports” such as Luxembourg’s are becoming their repositories of choice. Their attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. This special treatment is possible because goods in freeports are technically in transit, even if in reality the ports are used more and more as permanent homes for accumulated wealth. If anyone knows how to game the rules, it is the super-rich and their advisers.

Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. It is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and rising. Though much of what lies within is perfectly legitimate, the protection offered from prying eyes ensures that they appeal to kleptocrats and tax-dodgers as well as plutocrats. Freeports have been among the beneficiaries as undeclared money has fled offshore bank accounts as a result of tax-evasion crackdowns in America and Europe.

Source: Über-warehouses for the ultra-rich

According to the NYT article there are four Freeports for storing art and luxuries in Switzerland, and others opened in the last 5 or so years in Singapore, Monaco, Luxembourg and most recently, Newark, Delaware. Delaware? Really? What else is in Delaware. Oh yeah… Credit Card banks and Banksters!

Though the practice has been going on for several years, there are rising concerns about corruption and even illegality in the practice. Again from the NYT:

Case in point: $28 million worth of works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Joan Miró and others now stored in the Geneva Free Port. Equalia, a company registered by Mossack Fonseca (the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers controversy about how the wealthy conceal their riches), stored the works on behalf of a diamond broker, Erez Daleyot, in 2009. Once in storage, the art was used as collateral for debts Mr. Daleyot owed to a Belgian bank, according to court papers. Now a man named Leon Templesman, president of a New York diamond manufacturing company, Lazare Kaplan International, is trying to seize the art as part of a dispute with Mr. Daleyot and the bank.

A Freeport named Equalia - Can one get more freaking Orwellian in describing a vault to enrich further the beneficiaries of income inequality??!!??

For others, people who actually care about Art and Culture, such as museum professionals, there are deep moral and ethical concerns with this practice. Again from the NYT.

“Works of art are created to be viewed,” said the director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, who described free ports as the greatest museums no one can see.
Some see even higher stakes for contemporary works, as they can be whisked off, their paint hardly dry, before ever entering the public’s consciousness. Storage puts the art “intellectually almost in a coma,” said Joanne Heyler, the director of the Broad Museum.

Almost in a coma… Did you ever see that movie based on the book of the same name by Robin Cook? Great airport reading as I recall. There was a scene where all the human specimens were in suspended animation, waiting to have organs harvested for profit. That is how I see these collections of art, now suspended in deep storage, never intended to be seen again until briefly placed on the auction block to reap millions, before returning to someone else’s Freeport vault, exactly as it happened to one of DaVinci’s pieces described in the article.

Of course in this case the art is not physically destroyed. It is probably beautifully preserved, physically. However, the soul of these pieces, what they contribute to our cultures and civilizations, that is what is obliterated while they are so unethically privatized. They should be returned to public accessibility, if not ownership.

Public accessibility to art and cultural material is at the very foundation of democratic principles in this country and throughout much of the world.

Public Access and Museums, a bit of history:

What is a Museum?

According to the ICOM Statutes, adopted by the 22nd General Assembly in Vienna, Austria on August 24th, 2007:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

This definition is a reference in the international community.
Source

Of course museums did not start out way. The earliest “museums” established during the Renaissance were coined Cabinets of Curiosities. These were the private galleries found in the Vatican, in the Villas, Chateaux, Castles and Great Houses of the nobility, the ruling class, for display only for other clergy, nobles and other members of the elite. There was nothing public or educational about these collections. They contained the art, antiquities, oddities, rarities, riches and objects of elegance meant to illustrate the wealth and power of their owners.

The artists and arts of the Renaissance began to dispel the ignorance of the preceding age with their vision, creativity, curiosity and skill. Their art, however, was funded and owned by the elites who patronized them. Art was not yet to be experienced by or for the people. This art, or cultural material, was something passed on as inheritance, within the private family line. It was not yet part of a community or public cultural heritage.

Cultural Heritage

Unlike property acquired through inheritance, an asset passed down for private wealth: Heritage is a public good; its preservation must be assumed by the community when individuals fail to do so. Source

Culture is a basic need. A community thrives through its cultural heritage, it dies without it.

Cultural heritage consists of tangible and intangible, natural and cultural, movable and immovable assets inherited from the past. It is of extremely high value for the present and the future of a country. Access, preservation, and education around cultural heritage are essential for the evolution of people and their culture.

The Revolutionary Age of the 18th and 19th centuries gave rise to the great Public Museums for the display and preservation of cultural heritage for the public good. The Public Museum was a tangible manifestation of the very idea of Democracy. The British Museum opened in 1753 and went public in 1759. The Uffizi, founded by the de Medici’s, went public in 1743. The Louvre went public in 1793. In the US Charles Wilson Peale founded the first public museum in 1786 in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Peale was a portrait artist who painted the likenesses of many of this country’s founding leaders. It is notable that Peale utilized Linnaean taxonomy to organize natural history specimens, moving away from collections of oddities and into a scientific and educational approach.

The later 19th and early 20th centuries saw the foundation of many of America’s great Public Art and Natural History Museums by the Monopolist Industrialists or Robber Barons of the Gilded Age like Carnegie, Field, Frick, Mellon, Huntington, Rockefeller, Morgan, Phelps-Dodge, Hearst and Heye among others. These were the 1% of their time, and they did give some other their wealth for the public good through philanthropy - for museums, universities, hospitals and other valued institutions in spite of being oinkers of the first order as employers. These museums too are not free of problems. Many are temples of colonization to this day, but many are at least addressing that problem in recent decades by compliance with the Native American Graves Protection Act.

The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor. ~~ Mark Twain

And so it goes…

Today’s public museums are still beholden to the few philanthropists who help fund anything public. Their numbers are dwindling. Alternative sources like public funding through government appropriations and grants have also been drying up. Anyone remember the Detroit Institute of Art? How about the Illinois State Museum? Did you know that New York City’s larger museums are looking at huge staff layoffs in coming months to address their shrinking budgets?

Yes, we are at a familiar cross-roads again, looking down the abyss of a new dark age where the very few feudal overlords keep our cultural heritage captured in their precious vaults. Our heritage becomes purely objectified and stripped of meaning as is transformed into an asset for the accumulation of more, always more, of their own personal family wealth. These Neo-liberal fuckers make the Robber Barons look like Saints.

We need a new wave of Robin Hoodism to liberate this cultural heritage from such a fate. If we lived in sane times, that Robin Hood would come in the form of decent newly drafted New Deal inspired regulation of the off the charts chaotic capitalism and kleptocrats of our times. Yes, I’ll say it, this country needs Neo-Socialism. The pendulum has swung too far to the extreme and must be brought back to balance. This is of course not only for art and culture’s sake, but more so for the sake of the very planet.

If there is no chance for Robin Hood law and policy, then there will have to be Robin Hood activism, much like that of the original namesake. Something better change and quickly. Summer is coming…. Perma-summer.

Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts.