Good morning. Canadian tax breaks to drive art donations may have worked a little too well – more on that below, along with a surge in whooping cough cases and the start of the Paralympic Games. But first:
Today’s headlines
- The serial killer who murdered four First Nations women in Winnipeg is sentenced to life in prison
- Israel launches a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank
- The once-powerful B.C. United party suspends its campaign and will endorse B.C. Conservatives in the coming election
The Montreal Museum of Fine Art displays only 5 or 6 per cent of its works.Christinne Muschi/Christinne Muschi/The Globe and
Art
The no-shows
Right now, at an art gallery somewhere across the country, a staffer is trying very carefully to Tetris a wildly valuable painting into a crowded vault. Canadian public art collections have exploded over the past two decades, which means there’s only space to display a small fraction at any time. At Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, for instance, a full 98 per cent of the holdings are in storage – a white-and-red Rotkho spent more than 10 years hidden away. (I would like to state for the record that I’m happy to take this Rothko off the AGO’s hands.)
As The Globe and Mail’s visual art critic Kate Taylor reveals in her new report, these ballooning collections are the result of an extremely generous system of tax breaks. Back in the 1970s, Canada realized it was losing precious artwork to major American institutions and private homes. To shore up our galleries’s supply, it began offering big incentives to individual donors, while giving Canadian museums first dibs on buying important art. But was this tactic too successful? And how can we wrangle our collection creep back into submission? I asked Taylor to break it all down.
In order to qualify for a tax break in Canada, donated art needs to have cultural significance. Who determines that, and how?
A panel of experts convened by the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board determines if a work is of outstanding significance, based on evidence provided by the curators at the museum that will get the art. It used to be that the art also had to be of national importance, but that was dropped after a recent case where a judge queried how a French Impressionist painting could be considered Canadian cultural heritage. Museums argued foreign art is significant to Canada, too.
Just how generous are these tax credits?
Among the most generous in the world, although the U.S. system is simpler and can be even more generous. Here, you both get a tax credit for the market value of your art donation – and it’s a better credit than you get for gifts of cash – and you skip the capital gains tax you would have to pay if you sold. That’s particularly attractive to a collector who has art they’ve owned for decades and that has greatly appreciated in value – just the kind of art that might interest a museum. I did the math, and on a $1.2-million painting with a $1-million capital gain, the loss from donating instead of selling was less than $250,000.
And museums are keen to pad their collections – but you’re not seeing very much of it on display.
No museum ever shows more than a tiny percentage of the art it holds. The AGO, for example, has a very large collection of prints, drawings and photographs – works that can’t be exposed to light on a regular basis. That in part explains why its display rate – about 2 per cent – is so low, compared to say the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which often displays more than 6 per cent. The AGO is an aggressive collector. Its holdings grew by 23 per cent between 2015 and 2020. Part of the impetus is to diversify; for example, to buy the work of neglected female artists.
At the AGO, 98 per cent of the art is in the vaults.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Just to quantify this: There are more than 112,000 items stored away in the AGO’s vaults. Is it jam-packed in there?
The AGO’s vaults are fascinating and I was really privileged to be given a tour by chief curator Julian Cox and staffers. They aren’t jam-packed – the art is safe – but certainly full, and full of activity, with crates of art going out on tour and crates of art coming in for shows. The prints and drawings vault is particularly impressive; it’s a two-storey room of metal cabinets and shelves full of boxes, all supremely well-organized. I think it’s the smaller institutions that often struggle to keep basic safety measures in place – sprinklers, water alarms, security alarms, that kind of thing.
The AGO is about to expand, as are Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux arts and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Is that a workable solution to collection creep?
There is recognition that you can’t expand forever. The Montreal museum had a good run there, where it just kept enlarging its campus, but the philosophy at that institution has changed since director Stéphane Aquin arrived in 2020. The AGO’s current expansion focuses exclusively on building room to get more of the collection on display. They’re also rotating the permanent collection more regularly, but of course that takes staff, too. Meanwhile, raising money to build more storage is not so sexy.
When does a gallery have enough art? When does it in fact have too much?
I have always thought museums need to be highly discriminating in what they accept and particularly careful not to take job lots – that is, accept a whole bunch of stuff they maybe don’t need just to get a few gems. It’s hard to say no to donors who have great art and are offering you a gift. But we have to remember the public is buying the art with tax credits, at a steep discount – 40 to 50 per cent off market value.
Deaccessioning – culling a collection to buy different art and curate it – is becoming more common. It’s an obvious solution. It may be like your bookcase: No new book should come into the house unless an old one goes out. The difficulty is that tastes change. You don’t want to dump art and then come to regret it.
Quick programming note: I’m off for the next two weeks to go look at some art, but you’re in good hands with great Globe writers. I’ll see you back in your inbox in September.
The Shot
‘I want my children to enjoy this lake all their life.’
Taking samples from walleye in the lake.David Jackson/The Globe and Mail
On Lake Nipigon in northwestern Ontario, Indigenous guardians go deep to see how the waters were transformed by hydro development in the 20th century. Read more about their protection efforts here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: Whooping cough is surging in several parts of Canada and, especially, Quebec, where there have been 12,388 cases so far this year – up from roughly 600 at the same time pre-pandemic.
Abroad: France’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov marks an escalation in the ongoing struggle to curb illegal activity online.
The Games: There was a tricolour flyover, a bunch of jaunty Europop and a jubilant parade of athletes along the Champs-Élysées. Check out the photos from the opening ceremony of the Paralympics.
The ground: Oops, it might be a bit longer before the first-ever private spacewalk: The U.S. Federal Aviation Agency grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket after some landing snafus.