2024-09-16 03:01:00
The Government is cooking up a decree which could represent a danger to the national artistic heritage and result in several points regressive for artists who sell works abroad, although the speech suggests exactly the opposite. It is an initiative in which four parties are working together: the Ministry of Deregulation, the Ministry of Culture, Customs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and which will be released soon, “in weeks” according to official sources. The Ministry’s workers prepared a report to make known everything that is at risk. In dialogue with Page/12the researcher believes Abel Ferrino and the plastic artist Magdalena Jitrik.
The first to speak on the subject was Minister Sturzeneggerat the Council of the Americas, where he said that “exporting a work of art is a real nuisance: you have to go to the Ministry of Culture, and if the artist died more than 50 years ago, the State must decide if it wants to buy the work (…). The idea is to weed out (…). It is not about simplifying, but about eliminating.” Then the Secretary of Culture, Leonardo Cifelliwhen he announced lines of support for the National Arts Fund at the CCK. He alluded to bureaucratic obstacles, barriers put in place by the State that would prevent Argentine art from being “a protagonist in the international market.” He returned to the subject this Thursday on his Instagram account, with a similar message about the task he is undertaking with Sturzenegger.
The decree will modify the articles of Law 24.633, on International Circulation of Artistic Workssanctioned in March 1996 and inspired by the economic deregulation decree of former Minister Cavallo. The rule was last modified in 2018, during the Macri administration, with decree 27/18“The objective is to remove all the obstacles that today prevent gallery owners, artists, and collectors from being protagonists in the international art market. The art market in Argentina is isolated from the rest of the world by barriers that need to be eliminated,” they told Page/12 Culture sources. Without going into details, they anticipated “changes, eliminations in purely bureaucratic articles that hinder the art market, such as the permit procedure, the Council or the Enforcement Authority“What is at stake is clear from the statements that officials have made at different times and from what they have expressed behind closed doors in conversations.
“For Sturzenegger, a ton of soybeans is the same as a painting by a great Argentine art master”simplifies Ferrino, researcher and professor of Cultural Heritage at UNTREF and an expert in Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Goods. Current legislation establishes that when exporting a work of art from a country, artist who died more than 50 years ago -whether national or not-, the enforcement authority (Culture) must convene a committee of experts to determine whether its exit from the country constitutes a detriment to the national heritage, which is denied with the exercise of the option of purchase by the State or third parties resident in the country. “If neither the State nor private individuals buy it -at a price set by the owner- the export permit is granted,” he explains. Nicolas Rodriguez Saageneral secretary of the Internal Board of ATE of the Ministry of Culture.
This is the case as of 2018. Since then, only five works have had this treatment. In 1996, the prohibition of the exit of a work from the country was directly established, in line with restrictions contained in the legislation of countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and Spain. That is why Ferrino warns that The history of the protection of works of art in Argentina has, since the nineties, gone from deterioration to deterioration, from deregulation to deregulation.because there is practically nothing left to deregulate. They are about to touch the little protection that remains. “What else do they want to free up? As it is part of history and identity, there is no freedom anywhere in the world to remove cultural heritage..”
In short, the decree would remove the enforcement authority as a bureaucratic obstacle, in addition to dissolving the advisory board and annulling the permit process. Thus, The Ministry of Culture would no longer have the power to determine which paintings are sold abroad without first considering other options.. He spoke about this intention Eduardo Malleadirector general of Customs at AFIP. Key fact: he is a collector and former vice president of Arteba. “Licenses for works by artists who died more than 50 years ago are going to disappear,” he told The Nation. The Ministry of Culture confirms that this is one of the guidelines of the project, although it attenuates its scope by ensuring that the heritage will be protected with the generic ley 25.197, designed for the registration and documentation of the assets of the National State.
“Sturzenegger and Cifelli are lying when they talk about restrictions. Today, exports are free. It is easier to take a painting out of the country by completing a brief online procedure. (via Culture), to process an ID or a driver’s license“, Ferrino clarifies. “With this decree, a whole room of the National Museum of Fine Arts could be sold – its director, Andrés Duprat, is in favour – or half of the Fernández Blanco Museum,” he warns. There are precedents of significant losses: “The Blaquiers had the best collection of French impressionism in Latin America. They removed them as temporary paintings with the decree signed by Macri. Those paintings never came back.”
The report of the Culture workers ends with a Summary contrasting the “benefits” of the current regime with the “consequences” of deregulation. Among the first are these items: the current process is free and takes only 48 hours, cultural goods have customs benefits, artists can export 15 works “without complications”, smuggling can be detected. Among the second: artists will have to pay things they didn’t before (such as management, export duties, VAT); cultural heritage at risk; works of art at risk in customs warehouses. “They lie about bureaucratic obstacles: almost 54 thousand exports have been resolved since 2018,” the document concludes. “By removing Culture as the enforcement authority, they want to turn this into a new business for Customs”criticizes Rodríguez Saá.
The painter Magdalena Jitrik, who has been exporting works for a long time, talks about the impact of the decree in the making from that side. “For me, they want to take works out of the country and that’s it, because it’s going to make things difficult for us artists. Currently we don’t pay taxes at Customs for sales, when they say ‘Deregulation’ is taking away a privilege“I suspect. “I have had all kinds of difficulties but they were never from the Culture or the law – which tends to recognize the particular status of this commodity, with the intervention of that area – but with the AFIPto the point that I don’t want to export anymore,” he explains. The criteria for being a self-employed person do not take into account the particularities of his activity. “When the AFIP detects a large transfer from abroad, it jumps in and sends you an inspection, which is what happened to me. They persecuted me because through the sale I got into a category in which I had to have a registered employee and I had to pay a huge fine,” Jitrik explains.
“Sturzenegger’s approach is very misleading. By repealing the law on the export of works that are subject to a license from the Culture Department, it is possible that Many come out undeclared. This may be suitable for collectorsto a social class that wants to free itself from the State’s guardianship over these assets. And it is the acceptance that we will always be poor and stupid, without treasures. A colony,” he laments. “The process also allows us to know How many works come from Argentina? and the foreign trade of the work of art is not miserable,” he adds. Furthermore, what would happen without this mapping in the face of the idea of making an exhibition like the one currently offered by the Malba in homage to Kosice, with pieces from the Hydrospatial City that are distributed in different museums around the world, such as the one in Houston? This is another of the questions raised by the controversial measure that is being prepared.