New Orleans Taxing Local Artists
by Daniel Grant
|
|
Rue Bourbon
Samuel Gillis
|
Dean Mitchell, an Overland Park, Kansas painter, whose artwork has been consigned
to Bryant Galleries in New Orleans, recently received a tax bill for $8,000
from the City of New Orleans. But this was not a tax on any picture that had sold; it was an inventory tax.
 |
|
|
|
|
Mitchell, like every other artist represented by the gallery, was
required to pay it because he had valuable property in a retail establishment within
the city limits. The gallery doesn’t pay an inventory tax on goods its doesn’t own,
so the artists must foot the bill.
|
Original Dixieland One-Step
Annie Wandell
|
|
|
Blue Bayou
Roni Saunders
|
“It’s ridiculous. I’m not going to pay it,” Mitchell said. “My accountant also said not to pay it. He said just don’t get pulled over in Louisiana.” His gallery is attempting to work out some arrangement with the city assessor’s office to eliminate or lower the tax that he and the other artists have been told to pay, but the city is supposedly within its rights to charge such a tax, according to Steve Armbruster, an attorney in New Orleans.
|
|
|
|
|
“New Orleans these days is clutching at straws for revenue production.” There is a widespread sense within the dealer community in New Orleans that this particular element of tax collection has been handled haphazardly and may not stand. Only some galleries in the city, particularly those in the French Quarter, have been served inventory tax notices.
|
Music in the Back Alleys of New Orleans
Samuel Gillis
|
|
|
New Orleans
Herb Weinberg
|
“You have to wonder,” said Gilbert Edelson, administrative vice president of the Art Dealers Association of America, “how long the New Orleans art market can survive if they’re going to tax artists like that.”
|
|
|
|
Read our archived Art in the News |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
