Social Practice

The Artist Tax Deduction Bill is finally up for action in the House. “Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage” it’s not, but the text of the bill does seem like it’s a step in the right direction.
After announcing at the Congressional Arts Breakfast on Arts Advocacy Day that he would be the lead sponsor for the Artist Deduction Bill, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) introduced the bill on March 14, 2007, joined by Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN). Identical to a Senate bill introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT), the bill supports individual artists by allowing them to take a fair-market value tax deduction for tangible works they donate to nonprofit collecting and educational organizations, and it benefits the public by giving them access to more art. The ‘works’ covered under this bill are “contributions of literary, musical, artistic, or scholarly compositions” which would seem to leave plenty of room for artistic activities that do not produce a physical product. The only stumbling point, from my perspective, in the language of the bill is the bit about a “qualified appraisal of the fair market value . . . of the work.” Now, the bill doesn’t specify what makes the appraisal ‘qualified,’ but I wonder how the IRS would read a tax deduction for “dish washing” or “conversation.”

Bill: H.R. 1524 (House) and S. 548 (Senate).

If one thing is clear, it’s that Mircea Cantor likes his art history. As a Romanian artist (currently based in Paris), he left home eight years ago hitchhiking across europe with a blank sign (implying that he had no destination and was willing to travel anywhere). Adding to the Beuys-ian echos is a piece from 2005, “Deeparture,” a film documenting the uneasy circling of a wolf and a deer trapped together in a gallery space. Going even further back through art history is the cheeky photograph of discarded urinals titled “I shot this image because it is highly suggestive within a specific circle.
Perhaps his most interesting art historical repurposing happens in “The landscape is changing,” in which Smithson’s mirror displacement becomes a vehicle for protest. The documentation of this event (2003) reveals demonstrators marching through the capital of Albania with mirrors in the place of traditional slogans on their picket signs.

His show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art just came down, and back in December, 1995 Frieze did a small write up on some recent work.
He’s also the co-editor of Version Magazine.

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