The New York Times today features a piece about millions of works of art stored by wealthy collectors in a “free port” in Geneva for tax purposes. You buy a work of art in New York for $100 million and avoid a $4 million tax assessment by shipping the work to a free port. And there it is in storage, accumulated as investment.
This image that accompanies the piece shows a chain-link and barbed-wire fence that surrounds the Geneva Free Port.
It is meant, of course, to keep thieves out. But as early advertisers of barbed wire knew well, a barbed-wire fence looks in both directions, inward and outward. While keeping thieves out, the fence imprisons the art.
The super rich don’t pay taxes, nor do they appreciate the art. They just let the art appreciate in the dark of the free port prison.
About Scott Abbott
I received my Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University in 1979. Then I taught at Vanderbilt University, BYU, and Utah Valley State College. At Utah Valley University, I directed the Program in Integrated Studies for its initial 13 years and was also Chair of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy for three years. My publications include a book on Freemasonry and the German Novel, two co-authored books with Zarko Radakovic (REPETITIONS and VAMPIRES & A REASONABLE DICTIONARY, published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade and in English with Punctum Books), a book with Sam Rushforth (WILD RIDES AND WILDFLOWERS, Torrey House Press), a "fraternal meditation" called IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME (University of Utah Press), and translations of three books by Austrian author Peter Handke, of an exhibition catalogue called "The German Army and Genocide," and, with Dan Fairbanks, of Gregor Mendel's important paper on hybridity in peas. More famously, my children are in the process of creating good lives for themselves: as a model and dance/yoga studio manager, as a teacher of Chinese language, as an ecologist and science writer, as a jazz musician, as a parole officer, as a contractor, as a seasonal worker (Alaska and Park City, Utah), and as parents. I share my life with UVU historian Lyn Bennett, with whom I have written a cultural history of barbed wire -- THE PERFECT FENCE (Texas A&M University Press). Some publications at http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 
The very nature of Art is to be seen, to be shared. Its real worh is in the viewing, letting it touch, enrich or instruct us. Greedy men who can’t see or feel Art take the truth of its power and turn it into monetary sums. How sad that something so natural and part of being Human is so abused and denied to others.
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amen!
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this is so depressing. agree with what dan said.
i was thinking this is why it is so good that we can just write into the internet, all for free and able to share things that cannot maybe shared otherwise.
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It is depressing. As was the essay in this week’s New Yorker about a Swiss man who stole information from a big Swiss bank he worked for and delivered it to various countries whose citizens were evading taxes by hiding their money in Switzerland. And the Panama Papers. And on and on. The rich. I despise these kind of rich people.
The internet is wonderful, as you say. So are open access publishers like punctum books that published Zarko’s and my books and lots of other interesting things. And so is your blog.
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