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.
Highlights
The world’s largest art collection sits behind a complex of monolithic, drab-looking warehouses on the side of a busy intersection near the city center of Geneva, Switzerland
At once at the service of art collectors and financial operations, the free port is the spatial pivot for complicated mechanisms for the capture and generation of value, integral and outside the global art market
In order to avoid the practice of storing valuables indefinitely and/or through an agent or shell corporation to circumvent capital gains taxes, the Swiss Customs Act imposed a six-month time limit on goods stored in the free ports and obliged the Geneva Free Port to list the ultimate beneficial owner in its inventory of goods
Summary
The world’s largest art collection sits behind a complex of monolithic, drab-looking warehouses on the side of a busy intersection near the city center of Geneva, Switzerland. By embedding the free ports in a longer genealogy of offshore capitalism, this section will show how the image of these extraordinary regulatory spaces as mythical islands in an otherwise homogenous juridico-political regime of globally regulated markets is misguided. Offshore financial centers as particular versions of extraordinary regulatory spaces became central to global capital circuits, and were instrumental in orchestrating the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 by helping banks and companies hide underperforming assets and conceal serious losses in some of these jurisdictions while playing a role in generating enormous amounts of liquidity (Palan et al 2010) This made art, a still largely unregulated market, an increasingly interesting asset to invest in, especially in light of the collapse in real estate prices accompanying the.
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