Brazil’s Art World Strangled by Red Tape

SÃO PAULO — The arrival of six 20th-century paintings, mostly portraits, on loan from the Tate Modern in London was to have been a cultural coup for the São Paulo Art Museum as it expanded its international art exchange program.

Instead it has become a messy legal battle — one that has jeopardized the exhibition and other major art programs across the country.

When the six pieces arrived in May, officials at an airport in São Paulo presented the museum with a $320,000 bill for unloading and storage — triple the total budget to mount the exhibition — to be paid before the paintings could be retrieved.

The cargo fee for paintings had been assessed according to their weight. Now, some of Brazil’s main international airports have begun charging a percentage of the paintings’ values, which increased cargo fees from a few dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars — a prohibitive expense for art venues.

This was a blow to Brazil’s art world and to its international image, also damaged by the destruction of its National Museum, which burned to the ground last week and did not have a fire protection system, raising questions about the country’s preparedness to borrow from other institutions.

The airports’ fee change was sudden, hinging on a reinterpretation of existing rules, according to the Culture Ministry. And it left the museum, known as MASP, one of the most important in Brazil, scrambling.

“They didn’t give us any warning,” said Heitor Martins, MASP’s president. “We’re talking about a handling fee for a few hours’ work.”

The museum’s lawyers quickly obtained a court injunction requiring the airport to revert to its earlier formula, and the fee ended up the equivalent of $46.

Doing business in Brazil almost always requires navigating a tangle of red tape, filling out piles of paperwork and paying onerous import taxes — collectively known as “Brazil cost.”

But the legal and regulatory battle that museums, art fairs, galleries and even orchestras have waged to avoid canceling long-planned events is unprecedented, experts said.

Among the airports that have begun to reinterpret rules governing these fees are three international ones in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The repercussions were immediate.

The Tomie Ohtake Institute, a prestigious cultural center in São Paulo, was forced to postpone an exhibition of hundreds of prints from the Albertina Museum in Vienna until next year, said its director, Richard Ohtake.

“There are Rembrandt, Delacroix, Picasso and Warhol prints,” Ohtake said. “The cost could have been staggering, and we felt like we were taking too many risks.”

He said the institute may have to cancel the exhibition altogether because some pieces were already committed to other venues next year and there was no guarantee the situation in Brazil would be resolved.

“At first, nobody at the Albertina believed we were postponing because of airport fees,” he said. “They thought it was impossible.”

Under the rules governing Brazilian airports, cargo brought in as a temporary import for “civic-cultural events” is charged a few cents per kilo. Until recently, museums and orchestras could plan accordingly.

The change came when, without warning, airports this year started instead levying the standard rate for imported goods, 0.75 percent of the object’s value, on all art. Orchestras were first charged the new cargo fees at the end of last year.

The Viracopos International Airport in the state of São Paulo, which received the paintings from the Tate Modern, said in a written response that because museums charge entry fees and art fairs often sell paintings, they shouldn’t qualify for the “civic-cultural” exception, which is available to events that are open to the public.

“How can you have a culture of participation if the events segregate the population, since the entrance to most exhibitions is not free?” the airport argued in the statement.

But so far, courts have disagreed, granting injunctions that allow importers of art and instruments to pay according to weight.

Nonetheless, the legal tussle can be costly for small galleries and can leave world-famous pieces of art languishing in airports overnight, violating contractual agreements between museums.

“These changes are absurd,” Culture Minister Sérgio Sá Leitão said. “They don’t have any legal basis. Their only purpose is to try and increase revenue. And they don’t even do that!”

All the extra money spent by museums is going to lawyers, not airports, he said.

In response to the public outcry, the Transport Ministry created a special work group in August to review the situation and come up with recommendations within two months.

Smaller galleries, though, have delayed or canceled international art shows. Brazil’s biggest museums said the uncertainty could affect their programs for years to come.

“We have our big Van Gogh exhibition in 2023, and we have to organize it now,” said Martins of the MASP. “Each painting is worth $40 or $50 million dollars. With these policies, it’s just not viable.”

Together, MASP and the Tomie Ohtake Institute commissioned a study of some 30 major airports around the world, which found that none of them charge similar fees for temporary art imports, they said. The six paintings from the Tate Modern have been mounted in transparent frames alongside pieces from MASP’s permanent collection, giving visitors a peek at Francis Bacon’s somber “Seated Figure” as well as Sylvia Sleigh’s “The Bride,” a portrait of her husband in delicate pastel colors.

But Leitão, the culture minister, worries that other exhibitions will never be seen if the situation is not resolved quickly.

“These are events that will never be repeated in Brazil,” he said, “and the only losers are the Brazilian people.”