Art
Britain Moves to Regulate Its Art Trade. Bring Your ID
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LONDON — Britain’s embattled art trade, already rattled by the potential fallout from Brexit, is bracing for new rules intended to tackle money laundering and terrorism financing that some fear could further hamstring dealers in the country.
As of Friday, “art market participants” in Britain are subject to the regulations when conducting transactions worth more than 10,000 euros, or about $11,100. Under the rules, they have to register with the government’s tax agency, and dealers and auctioneers must establish the identity of the “ultimate beneficial owner” — meaning both seller and buyer — before entering into a transaction.
The legislation, ratified last month by the British Parliament, introduces largely without modification a European Union directive that is at various stages of implementation in other countries in the bloc.
“This is very serious. It could potentially change commonly accepted market practices,” said Kenneth Mullen, a partner at the London-based law firm Withers. “Due diligence is going to be fundamental. It does seem to mark a shift toward a more regulated industry.”
The international art market is generally an exclusive, often secretive business that has thrived in part thanks to the ability of buyers and sellers to maintain their anonymity.
According to Withers, legally certified photographic ID with a date of birth, as well as recent proof of the client’s residential address, will be required to conform with the British regulations, and the name should then be checked against relevant watch or sanction lists.
In 2018, the global art market turned over an estimated $67.4 billion in sales, according to last year’s Art Basel and UBS global report on the sector.
Britain, with London as its hub, is the second-biggest art trading nation after the United States, with 21 percent of global auction and dealer sales in 2018, according to the report. But will the new regulatory framework put British-based dealers and auction houses at a competitive disadvantage?
“It’s going to be difficult for the first year or two,” said Christopher Battiscombe, the director general of the Society of London Art Dealers. “But people will get used to being more open and supplying documents.”
“There are wild rumors about London being the money laundering capital of the world,” he added. “We have to be seen to be taking it seriously.”
Isabella Chase, a research analyst at the Center for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said it was impossible to estimate how much criminal money was being spent on art in the British capital.
“But it’s well known London has a money laundering problem,” she said. “We’re an attractive jurisdiction for the proceeds of crime and corruption and we’re an attractive place to spend it.”
In the absence of a rigorous regulatory framework, money laundering has been difficult to detect in the British art market, with the exception of some high-profile cases. In 2018, for example, the Mayfair-based dealer Matthew Green was charged with helping to launder money through a $9.2 million Picasso painting.
Two years earlier, the flamboyant Malaysian businessman Jho Low was revealed to have spent as much as $200 million of looted public funds on big-ticket works by artists including van Gogh, Picasso and Basquiat at Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions. Most of the pictures were bought in New York, but in 2014, Mr. Low spent $57.5 million on a Monet “Nympheas” canvas at a London auction.
Martin Wilson, the chief legal counsel at the auction house Phillips, said, “At the heart of the new legislation is a requirement that art market participants must carry out due diligence in relation to the identity of their customers and be able to answer the important question, ‘Who am I really dealing with?’”
Mr. Low (who is said to be in hiding) was a well-known figure, but hundreds of British dealers regularly do business with intermediaries whose livelihoods depend on not revealing the identity of an artwork’s “ultimate beneficial owner.” The legislation could make art advisers in the United States, who are currently not subject to such industrywide regulation, more reluctant to transact with British galleries.
Art traders in Britain have also expressed concern that a requirement to reveal the identity of a third party could affect smaller participants. “A dealer might represent one really good collector, and if the name has to be revealed, that collector could be could be taken by a bigger dealer,” said Nicholas Maclean, a partner at Eykyn Maclean, a dealership based in London and New York.
There are also practical implications for auction houses and dealers in administering the new legislation.
“It’s going to add 30 minutes to an hour of work every day,” said Alon Zakaim, a gallerist in modern and contemporary art based in Mayfair, central London. Mr. Zakaim added that he was nervous about having to comply with the legislation when he takes part in the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, in the Netherlands in March.
“If I don’t know someone, I’m going to have to ask them all these questions,” he said. “They could well feel it’s an invasion of privacy,” he added. “I could lose a client.”
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A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Turner Prize shortlist includes art showcasing Scottish Sikh community
A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Claudette Johnson has been nominated for this year’s Turner prize for her work, which includes a portrait of the African-American slavery abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond commissioned as part of the Guardian’s award-winning Cotton Capital series.
Pio Abad, Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas will compete for the £25,000 prize, while the nominated artists will each collect £10,000 as the prize returns to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.
Colonialism, migration, nationalism and identity politics are the key themes running through the 40th edition of the Turner prize, which the jury described as showing contemporary British art “is appealing and dynamic as ever”.
Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner prize jury, said this year’s nominees were exploring ideas of identity and would be exhibited from 25 September, before the jury’s final choice.
He said: “This year’s shortlisted artists can be broadly characterised as exploring questions of identity, autobiography, community and the self in relation to memory, or history or myth.”
The Turner prize, regarded as one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, is presented to an artist born or working in Britain for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work over the previous year.
Abad was nominated for his solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with the jury commenting on the “precision and elegance” of his work, which takes its title from a Mark Twain poem of a similar name that critiques American imperialism the Philippines, his homeland.
The show also contains references to the Benin Bronzes, after Abad discovered that the punitive expedition of 1897 – during which British troops sacked Benin City and looted thousands of objects, of which about 900 are in the British Museum’ – set off from his home, Woolwich, in south London.
Johnson was nominated for her solo Presence exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, which the Guardian said “brilliantly questions depictions of non-white figures by such revered painters as Gauguin and Picasso”. She was also recognised for her New York show, Drawn Out, at Ortuzar Projects, which included her Redmond portrait.
She is the latest black female artist who emerged in the Black Art Movement of the 1980s to be recognised by the Turner prize, following in the footsteps of Lubaina Himid (2017 winner) and Veronica Ryan (2022), while Ingrid Pollard and Barbara Walker have both been nominated.
The jury said Johnson had been nominated because of the “renewal of her practice”, after she stopped making work in the 1990s, and the fact she was still “taking risks and trying new forms of practice”.
Kaur’s work in the exhibition Alter Altar, which was shown at Tramway in Glasgow, features sculptures and soundscapes, including a red Ford Escort covered in a huge doily, which references her father’s first car and ideas of migration and belonging in Britain.
Kaur grew up in Glasgow’s Sikh community in Pollokshields, and the jury said the exhibition was a breakout show that was “generous, celebratory, moving and alive to timely issues, speaking imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division and social control”.
Le Bas’s work, shown at the Vienna Secession exhibition, was described as a “response to social and political turmoil” and includes immersive performance art with theatrical costumes and sculptures.
Farquharson said there was a chance the show may travel to Bradford during its City of Culture year, following the precedent set by Coventry, which hosted the awards in 2021, although that was still “to be confirmed”.
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