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| Chart and extrapolations by Prof Paul Fritjers, UQ |
"Artists Resale Royalties: a piece of pie…", which you can read in full
here, reflects some diligent digging by
John Walker and which was posted earlier this month in Club Troppo ("The suppository of all centrist wisdom since 2002"). To give you some idea of what it's about, John opens with some facts and a question which he then discusses:
"The ARR scheme so far has cost taxpayers just over $2.2 million and as of December 2013 has delivered a total of 7,800 royalty payments, to 800 artists (or estates) with a median value of about $105 per payment. The scheme has, in three and a half years, only generated a total of less than $200,000 in management fees. It is unlikely that the scheme will be self-funding any time soon, if ever. And what has this costly public art project delivered?"
John's conclusion?
"The millions of dollars of public money that has been wasted on this scheme, is money that was not spent on helping emerging and lesser known artists gain access to public exhibition and potential markets. It is all those lesser known artists that have been really ripped off by the funded lobbyists for their pet ‘art project’".
Readers may wish consider whether the Australian ARR scheme is (i) right in principle and right in practice, (ii) right in principle but wrong in practice, (iv) wrong in principle and wrong in practice or, improbably but not impossibly, wrong in principle but right in practice. Do let us know!
7 comments:
Might this not say more about the Australian art world than it does about ARR itself? Once the figures are available for the UK, I suspect a very different picture (excuse the pun) will emerge.
Andy ARR is a levy on the value of art resales, in every market that has been studied the Top 20 best selling artists account for most of the money in resales, therefore these top 20 best sellers must account for most of the value of any art resale levy , anywhere.
This is less pronounced in Australia, because our scheme is not retroactive and because artists (or estates) are not compelled to collect on all occasions, some of the big resales have been exempted by at least one Artists widow.
John,
Since ARR schemes have a minimum threshold, high volume, low value sales clearly don't gain from ARR, and neither do the artists responsible for such works. But where the jurisdiction includes either a group of highly valued artists (say the BYAs in the UK) or a number of prestige auction houses (eg London, New York) which attract the high value works, then those countries will see somewhat different ARR distribution figures to countries like, say Australia. That is not not to knock Australia or or its artists, but merely to comment that the results of a study into the distribution of ARR receipts there may not hold good in other countries. BTW I am not a fan of ARR!
Andy I am not sure that I quite follow you?
If you are saying that the skewing towards the top 20 could be even more pronounced in say the UK , I would agree.
However having done a fair bit of research on this subject, the distribution pattern (for resales of art by value) is remarkably, scale independent.
The reason why the Australian scheme is nonviable comes down to a combination of two factors,
1) most of the work done by the scheme (about %80)is only generating about %30 of its management fees.
AND
2) Because of constitutional requirements,the top %10 of individual royalty payments cannot be compelled to pay for virtually all of the total costs of the scheme- Hypothecated taxes are a no no down under.
Andy from the EC: Report on the Implementation and Effect of the Resale Right Directive (2001/84/EC)
"45% of the living artists making eligible sales in 2010 (2,271) fell in the price bracket below
€3,000, attracting a royalty rate of up to €150. A further 39% fell into the price bracket up to
€50,000, attracting a royalty of up to €2,030"
And:
" Living artists as % of total [value] 18%"
The above does suggest that the distribution pattern in the EU is not that different to that in Australia
Thanks John.
Andy J, a pleasure!
The truth is that the funded lobbyists over the last 15 years ignored repeated warnings that their -statutory ARR scheme was;a) against general policy,b) unworkable,c) of very doubtful net benefit to artists and d) constitutionally and legislatively a very big ask. Cognitive dissonance is probably the best (or kindest) term for the motive for the wasting of so much public money on their anti-progressive non-sense.
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