When I first came across the term Freeportism I wondered what it could possibly mean. Finding out made my heart sink. Did someone say curiosity kills the cat? The word was coined by Stefan Heidenreich, Professor at the Art Academy Düsseldorf, and refers to the practice of storing artworks in locations that are free from customs duties and taxes around the world, so called free ports. Millions of artworks. Geneva alone has a storage site that holds up to one million pieces, all in temperature controlled racks, carefully packed in wooden boxes, ready to be shipped to auction. Or not – depending on the current and future market prices.

There are whole empires of these free ports, from Luxembourg to Singapore, allowing art to be un-seen. Why on earth, you might ask? The answer is of course: money. And I am not just talking about hedge funds, derivatives or futures applied to art collection. Rather, art out of view is the perfect way to launder dirty money since there is no transparency.

Hito Steyerl, one of the first to recognize this threat to artists’ self-legislation, wrote: “conditions of possibility are no longer just the elitist “ivory tower,” but also the dictator’s contemporary art foundation, the oligarch’s or weapons manufacturer’s tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund’s trophy, the art student’s debt bondage, leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and the product of huge amounts of unpaid “voluntary” labor—all of which results in art’s accumulation in freeport storage spaces and its physical destruction in zones of war or accelerated privatization.”

We have a luxury goods market of a trillion dollars of which art comprises about 5%. Not many people who collect modern art any longer look at the inherent value of a piece – it has become a commodity of speculation, hidden in wooden crates so the market is regulated against flooding. Maybe the only way to see art in the future is on the street….

Read about it in more detail here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/freeportism-as-style-and-ideology-part-i-post-internet-and-speculative-realism/ And weep.

I am inclined to report that I have a freeport of my own that holds my stacked works in fantasies of future buyers: it is called my closet…..