Time magazine art critic Richard Lacayo, in his Looking Around blog, quotes Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the devastating impact of last year’s tax-law changes concerning fractional gifts of artworks to museums—a problem about to be revisited by Congress.
Benezra laments:
We have more fractional gifts than any museum in the country, something like 800. That change [in the tax law] has had an unbelievably negative impact on our acquisition program, a profoundly negative impact. The difference in the number of gifts from one year to the next has dropped off by 80% or something.