Legal Commentary II: Mexico and the Arts

Again, via the Art Law Blog, USA Today has the scoop on Mexico allowing artists to pay their income tax with works of art:

That's the deal Mexico has offered to artists since 1957, quietly amassing a modern art collection that would make most museum curators swoon. As the 2009 tax deadline approaches, tax collectors are getting ready to receive a whole new crop of masterworks.

"It's really an amazing concept," says José San Cristóbal Larrea, director of the program. "We're helping out artists while building a cultural inheritance for the country."

There's a sliding scale: If you sell five artworks in a year, you must give the government one. Sell 21 pieces, the government gets six. A 10-member jury of artists ensures that no one tries to unload junk.

(...)

Under the program, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit now owns 4,248 paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Leonora Carrington and other masters.

Incredible. Basically, the government of Mexico is saying "we value the arts enough to accept it as legal tender." That's what I call putting your money where your mouth is!

"There's no censorship here," says Julieta Ruiz, a curator at the museum.

If anything, the temptation to needle the taxman makes the art even edgier, she says.

Rafael Coronel's 1980 tax payment is a portrait called He Who Doesn't Pay Taxes. A painting that Fabian Ugalde contributed in 2002 declares in huge letters, "The authorities have still not determined whether it was an act of aggression or just another piece of art."

A 10-foot-high drawing by Demián Flores shows a man sexually assaulted by a rattlesnake, an apparent reference to the Mexican government because the rattlesnake appears on the Mexican flag.

The Mexican Government proves that if you have a sense of humor about yourselves, you can get along with artists much better. After all, if the Mexican government is unfazed by Coronel, Ugalde, or Flores' poking at their faces, the works lose all of their teeth instantly. If Mexico can smile and say "well at least they're paying their taxes," what are they going to do about it?

At any rate, I would like to pay my taxes in the form of a one-man show at the Kennedy Center, curated by Rocco Landesman. Any takers?

Legal Commentary: Pole Dancing is Not Art

Via the Art Law Blog comes news that NY State does not consider pole-dancing art:

The two-member Tax Appeals Tribunal held that the routines performed nude or nearly nude by dancers at the Nite Moves club near Albany were largely learned from other dancers or on YouTube and the Internet, and are not the kind of carefully arranged and practiced patterns of movement normally equated with the art of dance.

"We question how much planning goes into attempting a dance seen on YouTube," the tax appeals panel concluded in Matter of 677 New Loudon Corporation D/B/A Nite Moves, 821458. "The record also shows that some of the moves on the pole are very difficult, and one had best plan how to approach turning upside down on the pole to avoid injury. However, the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance."

I find this fascinating, because it shows what a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats think about the arts. A few notes:

• The legal frame of reference is rather muddled in the ruling. It says that pole dancing is not art because it is not "carefully planned and practiced." That implies that they are using the idea of art as a craft (a series of technical skills) as a lens for judgment. But then they also state that "the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance," implying that technical difficulty is not a qualification of art.
  
  
• Also, check out this basic rejection of Postmodernism:

"The appeals tribunal held, however, that "[dance expert] Dr. Hanna's view of choreographed performance is so broad as to include almost any planned movements done while playing canned music."

"To accept Dr. Hanna's stunningly sweeping interpretation of what constitutes choreographed performance, all one needs to do is move in an aesthetically pleasing way to music, using unity, variety, repetition, contrast, transition," the panel concluded."

• Luckily, it seems like the ruling is not, as the article makes it seem, a unilateral assessment that all pole-dancing is not art. We are used to pole-dancing in the stripper context, but having met plenty of people who now do pole-dancing as a fun workout, I wouldn't be surprised to see pole-dancing become its own sort of art form, in the way that flair bartending is, in my opinion, a performing art.
  
  
• The ruling also makes it clear that there is a legal line between an arts organization and a "place of entertainment." I shudder to think what would happen if arts organization were legally barred from being entertaining...