While art dealers fret about possible US tariffs, less discussed but very real EU cultural property laws come into effect this week. These aim to prevent trade in illegally exported goods but risk drowning the market in needless and costly bureaucracy, according to dealers and other market experts.
“Regulation is not a sexy topic. It’s more exciting to talk about a scandal than a sector that is being victimised, but the art and antiques trade is being victimised,” says Erika Bochereau, secretary general of CINOA, a confederation of more than 5,000 art and antiques dealers worldwide.
The European Union’s so-called 2019/880 legislation, which comes into force on June 28, was conceived to stop stolen or looted works, particularly those used to fund terrorism, from entering the EU. Objects more than 200 years old which originated from a country outside the EU will now need, at the least, a declaration of their legitimate export. The law applies to all items valued at more than €18,000 (including costs such as sales taxes, shipping and auction house fees), so anyone outside the EU with a collection of, say, English 18th-century portraits, Chinese antiques or pre-Colombian sculptures, needs to find evidence of legal export for each object before importing it into the EU, for display or for sale. There are even more stringent regulations for archaeological objects more than 250 years old.
“It is a totally understandable motivation to protect cultural property being moved around by unsavoury characters but, quite frankly, these regulations are totally excessive and absurd. There has never been a need to keep the paperwork once something has been legally exported, if there even was any,” says Pierre Valentin, co-head of art law at London-based law firm Fieldfisher. As Bochereau puts it, “you might have things in your house that you received from your grandmother and you don’t know where she got them, but that doesn’t mean they were stolen.”
Also of concern is the onus on the owner, who must sign a legal declaration that the item in question was legally exported. This means they “must know which country was the country of origin when the original export took place and what the local law was at the time, or that none existed,” explains Ivan Macquisten, who advises trade associations. It is “quite a terrifying statement”, says Charis Tyndall, director of the London antiquities and modern art gallery Charles Ede. “I’m sure people will get used to it, but right now it is a bit of an issue for anyone who just wants to buy something even with good provenance.”
Tyndall says the trade will ultimately adjust — “where there’s a will, there’s a way” — but for dealers based in the EU who specialise in works from outside, the incoming law is already taking its toll. “The stupid regulation will kill a lot of art galleries,” says Christian Deydier, a Paris and Hong Kong dealer of Asian art, notably Chinese archaic bronzes. He is closing his business in France this year, partly because of 2019/880. “I am not the only one leaving,” he says. “People are going to New York, Switzerland, the UK too, but I am the only one to speak up. This bureaucracy was not what the EU was meant to be for.”
The market is small within the scheme of things — average dealer turnover of antiques totalled $1.9mn in 2024 and old masters (1250-1821) at $4.8mn, while sales of postwar art alone were at $9.4mn, according to the latest Art Basel & UBS report. This finds too that average sales for the antiques trade fell 11 per cent in a “challenging” 2024. Bochereau says things have not improved much since: “If you ask most art dealers in every field, it not that easy to sell anything at the moment.”
Fairs in the EU that specialise in older art have their work cut out. There is an exception within the law that means items can come in temporarily, but this wouldn’t cover a work that then gets sold to a European buyer. “The process could take up to five months, why would you bother [as a buyer]? And if the work is refused for some reason, could it be seized while on EU ground?” Tyndall asks.
Will Korner, head of fairs at the prestigious Tefaf, says that such questions “are a big part of my life these days”. The devil is in the detail, quite a lot of which is yet to be defined. “It will be up to each national authority to apply the law and we don’t know how exactly it will work. Final guidance [from the EU] only came in the past few weeks and there are still different answers from the Dutch customs, the French authorities and the European Commission, for example,” he says. Changing the legislation is not on the cards, he says; he sees Tefaf’s role, alongside CINOA, as “making sure people understand about the implementation”. The situation “doesn’t suggest discontinuing the fair in Maastricht or its future in the EU”, he says.
Korner recognises the “noble aims” of the legislation but does not see “how its application will have a huge impact” on what it hopes to resolve. Others note that evidence of the art trade’s links to terrorism financing are slim, at best. “Nobody has the statistics,” say Bochereau. “Maybe 50 years ago the art market wasn’t as clean as it is today but now it is a business like any other, with hundreds of laws already and the transparency of the internet. The art market just has an image problem.”
There are scant verifiable figures for the value of the illicit trade in cultural property. Unesco raised alarm bells in 2020 when it put this at nearly $10bn a year, a figure that is heavily disputed by the trade (the figure would represent more than 17 per cent of the total art market). The EU Commission’s website cites an unnamed study that estimates the value of such illegal trade between €2.5bn-€5bn a year, though it notes that the value is “difficult to assess, since it is a criminal activity”.
The law has been welcomed in some corners. Vera Carasso, director of the Dutch Museums Association, told the Netherlands press: “In the past, many art objects were traded illegally. This way of working provides more control,” adding that the associated administrative and financial burdens are “unavoidable”.
An EU Commission spokesperson did not respond directly on whether claims around the trade’s links to terrorism had been satisfactorily proved. They say that its regulation “was adopted in 2019, which gave market participants a six-year period to prepare for the introduction of the licensing requirements” and that “importers following the rules will not face difficulties obtaining the necessary (online) import licences or filling-in (again, online) importer statements.”
Market players are yet to be convinced and see repercussions that go beyond the trade. “We are not as big as the modern and contemporary art market, but we still have important roles,” says Tyndall. “If it wasn’t for dealers, where would museums and private collections source their works? Imagine if they couldn’t have things that were more than 200 years old, a lot of knowledge would disappear.” Deydier’s vision is of a future comprised of only conceptual art by the likes of Maurizio Cattelan: “It won’t take long to destroy the market. There are already very few real collectors now. They will all just want to buy bananas.”
No Comment! Be the first one.