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Mythical Islands of Value: Free Ports, Offshore Capitalism, and Art Capital Post, Erik; Calvão, Filipe

Abstract

The Geneva Free Port in Switzerland has paved the way for a new generation of art and luxury free ports. These are critical spatial pivots for the management of art assets, including storage and transactions of artworks, and serve as proxy to examine mechanisms for the capture and generation of value, integral but also outside the global art market. Drawing from the trajectory of the Geneva Free Port and an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on “offshore” and other special zones of production, and value circulation in human geography, anthropology, history, and sociology, this article frames free ports in a longer genealogy of offshore capitalism. First, we claim that the emergence of the Geneva Free Port prefigures and helps illuminate contemporary transformations in offshore capitalism; second, these spaces are more deeply imbricated with public and state authorities than previously suggested. Finally, a holistic understanding of art capital—works of art for investment and asset management—requires an encompassing view of free ports not as accidental and exceptional features in the world of high art but as spaces deeply implicated in the creation and operation of the art market more generally.

Item Metadata

Title
Mythical Islands of Value: Free Ports, Offshore Capitalism, and Art Capital
Creator
Post, Erik; Calvão, Filipe
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Date Issued
2020-09-28
Description
The Geneva Free Port in Switzerland has paved the way for a new generation of art and luxury free ports. These are critical spatial pivots for the management of art assets, including storage and transactions of artworks, and serve as proxy to examine mechanisms for the capture and generation of value, integral but also outside the global art market. Drawing from the trajectory of the Geneva Free Port and an interdisciplinary body of scholarship on “offshore” and other special zones of production, and value circulation in human geography, anthropology, history, and sociology, this article frames free ports in a longer genealogy of offshore capitalism. First, we claim that the emergence of the Geneva Free Port prefigures and helps illuminate contemporary transformations in offshore capitalism; second, these spaces are more deeply imbricated with public and state authorities than previously suggested. Finally, a holistic understanding of art capital—works of art for investment and asset management—requires an encompassing view of free ports not as accidental and exceptional features in the world of high art but as spaces deeply implicated in the creation and operation of the art market more generally.
Subject
free port; offshore capitalism; art market; globalization; Geneva; value creation; tax evasion; art capital
Genre
Article
Type
Text
Language
eng
Date Available
2021-01-08
Provider
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights
CC BY 4.0
DOI
10.14288/1.0395527
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77022
Affiliation
Arts, Faculty of; Non UBC; Geography, Department of
Citation
Arts 9 (4): 100 (2020)
Publisher DOI
10.3390/arts9040100
Peer Review Status
Reviewed
Scholarly Level
Faculty
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Rights

CC BY 4.0