Art galleries are fully convinced that art is culture and that our spaces constitute, in practice, free-access cultural facilities. Likewise, we firmly state that there can be no defense of democracy, social cohesion, or global progress without culture, and that there could also be no mechanism or engine with the will to drive society without culture at its center.
However, it seems that for our leaders, culture is limited to music, theater, cinema, literature, circus, and bullfighting, disciplines that enjoy a substantially different tax treatment from that applied to art galleries. From the perspective of an art gallery, a book and a work of art are practically comparable; nevertheless, bookstores pay 4% in taxes, while galleries pay 21%.
This state of affairs is anomalous and unjust. Currently, Spanish artists suffer a significant comparative disadvantage by having to bear a VAT 100% higher than that of Italian artists (5%) and practically 100% higher than that of their French (5.5%), Belgian (6%), Portuguese (6%), German (7%), and Luxembourgish (8%) counterparts. And art galleries, whose main mission is to promote, defend, internationalize, and make visible the plastic creation of artists in our country —very far from any activity comparable to a banal "luxury," as is often insidiously and maliciously claimed— are forced to apply a VAT of 21%, more than double that of the other cultural activities mentioned above.
This situation implies that our tax rate is between 200% and 320% higher than that of our most immediate European competitors. Although the Spanish art market is currently among the six most relevant in Europe, behind the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium, these data point to an evident risk of imminent loss of competitiveness that could lead it to a position of lethal insignificance.
It should be reminded to the reader that four years ago, in April 2022, the Council of the European Union provided member states with the necessary tool to correct this situation through Directive (EU) 2022/542, which allows the application of a reduced VAT in the trade of our artists' works, whose transposition was mandatory. Spain is the only member country that has not done its homework, and for this reason, on March 11, the European Commission denounced Spain before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for not transposing said directive, creating insecurity and confusion in the rates to be applied and generating competitive distortions with the rest of the member states.
Distortions that also come into play with export taxes on works of art, taxes that only Spain applies and that violate the operating rules of the European Union, harming, again, the internationalization work of many of our most veteran artists and, above all, their legacies.
And it shouldn't be this way. Artists don't deserve it, nor do galleries. For this reason, we have tirelessly implored, over the last few years, with arguments and data, that the Government of Spain eliminate export taxes and adopt appropriate measures to move towards a scenario of greater competitiveness, progress, and sustainability, by harmonizing cultural VAT with that of neighboring countries. The comparative grievance is manifest, and the consequent loss of competitiveness will foreseeably lead us to a situation of progressive irrelevance.
The argument that by applying a competitive cultural VAT we are benefiting "the rich" is frivolous, childish, and cynical, given that this possibility already exists in the rest of neighboring countries and nothing prevents a Spanish buyer from acquiring a work of art abroad, of course. What is not at all frivolous is that the figures show that, by applying a VAT of 6% on the final sale price, the State would collect more taxes than with the special regime currently applied to the profit margin resulting from the purchase and sale of works of art, antiques, and collectibles. And this is because, with the relentless increase in operating costs, the profit margin of galleries has been considerably reduced.
What is not at all frivolous is that, by adopting a competitive cultural VAT, the economic viability of artists and galleries in this country will be helped and their activity protected. What is not at all frivolous is that, by protecting the art market, many other sectors that are intimately interconnected with it (transport, fairs, insurance, restorers, curators, critics, printing houses...) are beneficially affected, and in the exercise of their activity, generate more tax revenue than the art market itself can generate alone. Nor is it at all frivolous that some galleries, those that can do so, are forced to choose to go into exile in other countries, with the consequent loss of tax revenue for the State.
Honestly, there is no solid argument, neither from a cultural nor an economic perspective, that justifies the non-application of a competitive cultural VAT comparable to that of our neighboring countries. A reduction in VAT is not being demanded arbitrarily and capriciously; the need to compete on equal terms is being claimed in order to effectively and diligently fulfill our function as an essential link in the transmission of art between artists and collections in the country, and to be able to continue developing this work in our own territory.
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