Call that art? No, Dan Flavin’s work is just simple light fittings, say EU experts

Brussels reclassifies Dan Flavin’s sculptures in ruling that means they will be liable to 20% VAT

THE GUARDIAN

It is a question that has dogged the contemporary art world since Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery: but is it art?

When the lights were switched on at a Dan Flavin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, critics were entranced. “Beautiful,” Laura Cumming wrote in the Observer in 2006. “You wonder how it is possible that so much pleasure could emit from such a dismal source: the cold fluorescent tubes of strip lighting.”

But the European commission has taken a less poetic view. Brussels has ruled that the work of the American artist, who died in 1996 after half a century of creating pioneering sculpture, should be classified for tax purposes as simple light fixtures. His work, they said, has “the characteristics of lighting fittings … and is therefore to be classified … as wall lighting fittings”.

Dan Flavin’s 1987 work Untitled (to Don Judd, colorist) at Tate Liverpool last year. 

The ruling overturns an earlier UK customs tribunal verdict, and was denounced by one lawyer specialising in arts cases as “extraordinary”.

This is no mere academic view. It means Flavin works imported by any museum or gallery from outside the EU are liable to full VAT, which rises to 20% on 1 January. As sculpture the pieces would be subject to only 5% VAT.

The ruling also affects the work of Bill Viola, another American, who became the first living artist to have a major exhibition at the National Gallery in London, and whose video pieces, filmed in extreme slow motion, moved many viewers to tears.

Not the commission, which found: “It is not the installation that constitutes a ‘work of art’ but the result of the operations (the light effect) carried out by it.”
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@The Guardian