Displaying items by tag: taxpayers

Last spring, some heavy lifting in the California Legislature produced a budget bill that gave state arts funding its first legislated boost in more than a decade, albeit a modest one.

California taxpayers’ investment in the California Arts Council, the state’s grantmaking agency for nonprofit arts organizations and public school arts education, rose from $1 million to $6 million.

But Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal for the coming 2015-16 year puts advocates of arts spending back at the bottom of the hill. His spending plan gives the arts council just $1.1 million from the tax-fed general fund.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami wants a $2.5 million boost in government support, with taxpayers set to cover a third of the museum’s budget next year.

Housed in a new $130 million waterfront headquarters built largely with government money, PAMM’s celebrated debut late last year also tripled the non-profit’s annual operating expenses, to $14 million from $5 million. Private dollars have not kept pace with the higher costs, leaving a gap that PAMM wants Miami-Dade to help close with a 60 percent increase in the museum’s operating subsidy from hotel taxes, according to interviews and budget documents.

"A Helsinki Guggenheim,” says Petra Havu of the Association of Finnish Artists, “is not a project for taxpayers’ money.”

The Department of Justice has restrained Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Compotier et taste (1909) on behalf of the Italian government. The request is part of an ongoing investigation that Italian officials have been conducting. The painting, which is worth $11.5 million, is tied to Gabriella Amati and her late husband, Angelo Maj, who were charged by the Italian Public Prosecutors’ Office with embezzlement and fraudulent bankruptcy offenses. The restraining order was sought in connection with the criminal proceedings.

Amati and Maj, along with a public official in Naples, are accused of misappropriating tax receipts for the city. The trio also planned schemes to embezzle Naples’ tax revenue and fraudulently claimed refunds to Naples taxpayer to make transfers to their own bank accounts seem legitimate. The city of Naples lost approximately $44 million due to Amati and Maj’s schemes.

The Picasso painting, which was recovered by special agents in New York while it was being offered for private sale, will remain in the court’s jurisdiction. The U.S. is working closely with the Italian Public Prosecutors’ Office to forfeit the painting to Italy. Restraining the painting will hopefully help recovered the millions of dollars Naples lost because of Amati and Maj.

It was recently revealed that a Joan Miró (1893-1983) painting, which was damaged while on view at the Tate Modern in London, cost British taxpayers $326,000 to repair. Part of the museum’s retrospective of the Spanish modern artist, Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse I (1968), was damaged when a visitor placed both hands against the work to steady himself after tripping and falling in the museum.

A white canvas sliced by a delicately wavering gray line, Cell of a Recluse I is one of five rare triptychs by Miró, which were exhibited together for the first time during the Tate retrospective in 2011. The work was immediately repaired after the incident, which left the acrylic on canvas painting with dents and markings. Cell of a Recluse I was on loan to the Tate from Barcelona’s Joan Miró Foundation and the British government paid the Foundation over $300,000 to cover the repair costs for the painting and to account for any loss in the work’s value due to the incident.

The Tate has recently been responsible for a string of damaged artworks including Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) Black on Maroon (1958), which was defaced by a visitor, an early work by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1977) titled Whaam! (1963), which was also marred by a museum patron, and a portrait of Margaret Thatcher by Helmut Newton (1920-2004), which was damaged when a staff member slipped and cracked the photograph’s glass frame.