Subsequent week, round 200 up to date artwork galleries throughout Spain will shut their doorways to the general public. The six-day strike, from 2 to 7 February, is their newest protest in opposition to the nation’s 21% VAT charge for artwork gross sales, which gallerists say has hindered their success and sustainability in each the home and worldwide artwork markets. The tax, which was raised from 8% to 21% in 2012 by the nation’s conservative Partido Standard, has lengthy been a flashpoint for the commerce in Spain, and is now the best VAT on artwork in western Europe.
“The principle downside we’ve got now could be the lack of competitiveness in relation to our closest European neighbors,” Marc Domènech of Galeria Domènech in Barcelona tells The Artwork Newspaper by electronic mail.
Whereas in recent times different nations adopted a 2022 European Union Council Directive to designate specialised tax charges for cultural actions like artwork gross sales—7% in Germany, 6% in Portugal, 5.5% in France and 5% in Italy—Spanish VAT has remained the identical, even regardless of a 2024 promise by the nation’s minister of tradition to take motion.
The discrepancy “locations us ready of full irrelevance,” Domènech says, contending that Spanish galleries’ markedly larger VAT makes them much less engaging to shoppers and collectors. “The issue is additional exacerbated when the identical artist can also be represented by a gallery in one other European nation, because the tax disparity immediately influences buying choices,” notes Carolina Alarcón of Galería Alarcón Criado in Seville.
However the situation isn’t simply worldwide. Inside Spain, business actions associated to theatre, dance, music, cinema and even artists who promote their work immediately from their studios are topic to a ten% VAT. Spain’s contempoporary artwork gallery affiliation (Consorcio de Galerías de Arte Contemporáneo) strongly objects to galleries’ exclusion from this identical cultural taxation class, insisting in a 15 January assertion that its members supply the general public “free and fixed entry to inventive creation,” and calling the nation’s galleries “the most important museum in Spain.”
Gallerists are ‘important tradition staff’
For Alex Nogueras, of Prats Nogueras Blanchard in Madrid and Barcelona, “it isn’t nearly numbers, however about ceasing to deal with galleries as suspicious business brokers and beginning to recognise them as important cultural infrastructures,” he says. As such, placing galleries will even stop all of their normal professional bono work with private and non-private Spanish establishments and museums for 3 months, together with finding collectors, conducting archival analysis, coordinating transportation, and different duties.
Alba López Porto, the director of Galería Néboa in Lugo, affirms that the present VAT charge “has a really direct impression on our each day operations”, including that when purchases happen, “it’s the galleries themselves that take in a part of this price, adjusting margins or making use of reductions to forestall the value from skyrocketing as a result of tax”. She and different gallerists additionally report that top taxes can deter each new and established collectors from shopping for artwork within the first place.
Though companies of all sizes are affected by Spain’s VAT, up-and-coming galleries are particularly liable to dropping a viable path ahead, and this precarity inevitably impacts the rising artists that a lot of these areas typically characterize. “With out galleries artists lack the assist wanted to present visibility to their work,” says Borja Díaz Mengotti, the director of The Goma in Madrid. For the nation’s tons of of native artwork galleries, the implications are very actual. Daniel Cuevas of Galería Daniel Cuevas in Madrid warned that the federal government’s refusal to vary the present VAT state of affairs “will power many artists to desert their careers and lots of galleries to shut”.
Authorities inertia
So, what may be carried out? The perfect ally of Spain’s gallerists would be the ministry of tradition, which facilitates their artwork gross sales to state entities and gives them grants to advertise Spanish artists and take part in worldwide artwork gala’s. Nonetheless, many are annoyed with the federal government’s inertia. “The ministry of tradition tells us we have to discuss to the ministry of finance, whereas the ministry of finance tells us it’s a matter for the mInistry of tradition,” Isabel Mignoni, the director of Galería Elvira González in Madrid tells The Artwork Newspaper. “They’re simply passing the buck as a result of they suppose this solely impacts a really small sector.”
Export taxes are one other downside. “Spain is the one nation within the European Union that has them,” Domènech stated, calling them “unfair because it quantities to penalising galleries for eager to internationalise the legacy of deceased artists”. Ladies artists are particularly harmed by this, he provides. For Díaz Mengotti, the taxes are additionally outdated: “We proceed to function below cultural property export legal guidelines that have been enacted in response to looting that occurred in the course of the Spanish Civil Battle [1936-1939].”
The present strike comes only a month earlier than Arco Madrid, the nation’s most essential artwork honest, which is able to have fun its forty fifth anniversary in 2026. Final yr, greater than 70 Spanish gallerists turned out the lights of their stands to protest of the 21% VAT. Whereas it stays unclear how or if a change will happen, Alarcón is assured: “We’re satisfied that gross sales would improve. It has been confirmed that tax benefits have a direct and optimistic impression on the artwork market.”
