A Setback For Brazil’s Art World: Cargo Fees
of SÃO six 20th- PAULO, century Brazil paintings, — The arrival mostly portraits, on loan from the Tate Modern in London was to have been a cultural coup for the São Paulo Art Museum as it expanded its international art exchange program.
Instead it has become a messy legal battle — one that has jeopardized the exhibition and other major art programs across the country.
When the six pieces arrived in May, officials at an airport in Sao Pãulo presented the museum with a $320,000 bill for unloading and storage — triple the budget to mount the exhibition — to be paid before the paintings could be retrieved.
been The assessed cargo fee according for paintings to their had weight. Now, some of Brazil’s main international airports have begun charging a percentage of the paintings’ values, which increased cargo fees from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This was a blow to Brazil’s art world and to its international image, already damaged by the destruction of its National Museum, which burned down earlier this month and raising preparedness didn’t have questions a fire to borrow about protection the from country’s system, other institutions.
The airports’ fee change was sudden, hinging on a reinterpretation of existing rules, according to the Culture Ministry. And it left the museum, known as MASP, one of the most important in Brazil, scrambling. “They didn’t give us any warning,” said Heitor Martins, MASP’s president. “We’re talking about a handling fee for a few hours’ work.”
The museum’s lawyers obtained a court injunction requiring the airport to revert to its earlier formula, and the fee ended up the equivalent of $46.
The Viracopos International Airport, which received the paintings, said museums that charge entry fees and art fairs that sell paintings should not qualify for the "civic-cul-tural"exception for public events. Businesses in Brazil often face a difficult bureaucracy and pay high import taxes. But the battle muse-ums, fairs and even orchestras are now waging is an unprecedented fight, expertssaid. Among the airports that have be-gun to reinterpret rules governing these fees are three international ones in Sao Paub and R iodeJaneiro. The Tomie Ohtake Institute, a cul-turalcenterin Sao Paulo, was forced to postpone an exhibition of hun-dreds of prints from the Albertina Museum in Vienna until next year, said itsdirector, Richard Ohtake. "There are Rembrandt, Delacroix, Picasso and Warhol prints," he said. The cost could have been stagger-ing." The six paintings from the Tate Modern have been mounted at MASP, but Culture Minister Sergio SA Leith° worries about the fate of otherexhibitions. "These are events that will never be repeated in Brazil," he said, "and the on lylosers arethe Brazilian peo-ple."