On Thursday afternoon, the iconic New York gallery owner Mary Boone was sentenced to 30 months in prison. She had pleaded guilty in September to charges that she falsified her expenses to give the impression that the gallery was losing money. Boone admitted to transferring $9.5 million from one bank to another and claiming it was a deductible business expense; other “business” expenses included almost $800,000 for an apartment renovation and a $19,000 shopping spree at Hermès and Louis Vuitton. Artsy Magazine, online 2/14
Her lawyer ‘argued Boone’s crimes were due to a history of anxiety, depression, and addiction brought on by childhood trauma, and claimed that she had since found religion and clean living.’ No one necessarily believed any of that really justifies cheating on taxes, and closer to the truth would be, 'your honor, that’s just the way we do business.' She was operating in a realm where people piss away money just to impress their close social acquaintances, where sacrifice and honest effort are devalued, even demeaned, and no one knows or cares anything about art that sells for less than six figures and up, no limit. Every day she was helping high-roller clients manipulate the tax code, buying, trading, and donating to major civic institutions at enormously inflated prices, all tricks to hide their burgeoning seam-splitting dynastic wealth.
Surprised she was when agents showed up to explain that while she was enormously rich, she wasn’t wealthy enough to cheat outright. They deserve each other, the ultra rich and vultures like Mary, all of them cozily scamming each other, while the law is usually more concerned with petty crime, common bank robberies and such. Whatever they’re about, it has nothing to do with art, more like high stakes poker in which every play is a bluff, where every card has only momentary consensus value, and where the enormous pot of money in the middle stinks of tax fraud, money laundering, and larceny. What we have here is a political problem, so pervasive as to remain largely unseen, while the art is visual evidence of the debilitating distortion concentrated wealth causes throughout our culture. Time to look elsewhere.
Her lawyer ‘argued Boone’s crimes were due to a history of anxiety, depression, and addiction brought on by childhood trauma, and claimed that she had since found religion and clean living.’ No one necessarily believed any of that really justifies cheating on taxes, and closer to the truth would be, 'your honor, that’s just the way we do business.' She was operating in a realm where people piss away money just to impress their close social acquaintances, where sacrifice and honest effort are devalued, even demeaned, and no one knows or cares anything about art that sells for less than six figures and up, no limit. Every day she was helping high-roller clients manipulate the tax code, buying, trading, and donating to major civic institutions at enormously inflated prices, all tricks to hide their burgeoning seam-splitting dynastic wealth.
Surprised she was when agents showed up to explain that while she was enormously rich, she wasn’t wealthy enough to cheat outright. They deserve each other, the ultra rich and vultures like Mary, all of them cozily scamming each other, while the law is usually more concerned with petty crime, common bank robberies and such. Whatever they’re about, it has nothing to do with art, more like high stakes poker in which every play is a bluff, where every card has only momentary consensus value, and where the enormous pot of money in the middle stinks of tax fraud, money laundering, and larceny. What we have here is a political problem, so pervasive as to remain largely unseen, while the art is visual evidence of the debilitating distortion concentrated wealth causes throughout our culture. Time to look elsewhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment