The Opposite of a Freeport?
A tariff-ic new world!
John David Washington and Robert Pattinson reconnoiter in 2020’s Tenet.
Remember the Freeport? Remember when a country-less cadre of super-collectors were gobbling up priceless artifacts and spiriting them away to Swiss dungeons1? Remember Yves Bouvier2? Remember Succession?
ROMAN: “He’s got like a shit-ton of investment Impressionisms. Like three Gauguins no one has seen for tax reasons.”
FRANK: “I think his suggestion was it might be smart, tax-wise, just to leave them in the Geneva vault.”3
The Freeport—the legendary home of clandestine inter-oligarch relations—is curiously absent from 2025. There’s a reason for that—and it helps explain what tariffs are doing to the artworld.
II. Tariffs and the price of stretchers.
Apart from the conclusion of White Lotus,4 it’s all anybody has been talking about in the last week. A senior partner at Paula Cooper went on record with sentiments that dealers have been muttering to me: “The White House website is just ridiculous. Right now it appears that artworks are exempt. But this may change tomorrow.”5
Equally complicated is the international response. Artworks are not exempt from reciprocal Chinese tariffs levied against American imports, to take one thorny example—and it matters, because the artworld is profoundly integrated, as the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting observed in 20246:
“As the largest domestic market for art, and headquarters for the highest value international sales, the US remained the biggest importer of art, with a 32% share of global imports, down by 1% on 2022. Imports of art into the US were stable year-on-year, increasing slightly by 1%. Hong Kong accounted for the second-largest share at 19%, with Mainland China adding a further 5%.
(2025 UBS/ArtBasel report is due out this week,7 and whatever it says, it’s already out of date.) Hong Kong’s status as a freeport8 independent of Mainland China is a question-mark to say the least—and so, too, the question of enforcement.9 With so much confusion about what the rules are, we’re in a real “guess and check” moment.
There are some known-knowns that several outlets have picked up on: the costs of raw materials in art-making, like lumber for stretcher bars and frames. These tariffs are in effect, and not about to be offset by growth of American manufacturers. The US is a net importer of wood; it exports plenty, too. But artists materials aren’t raw timber; they are highly-processed small-batch products, often by centuries-old companies. English watercolor paper, French printing-out paper, Italian linen—these craft guilds won’t just sprout up next year in Duluth because of protectionism.
There will be considerable lag and dampening in the effect of those tariffs, though, because galleries don’t price in costs like these into the final price-list. Painters will have to absorb the rising cost of canvas. But a more immediate impact will be felt in the world of editioned objects—a sizable chunk of the contemporary art market. From Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs to photographs, editioned objects are fabricated when they are sold—and that may mean Canadian wood, German acrylic, Chinese aluminum, all of which may be assembled in a print lab in New York or London or Berlin. That just got a lot more expensive.
And this is exactly the idea behind freeports in the first place.10 As manufactured goods became more complicated, the success of a manufacturing line relied increasingly on global supply chains—and so rather than worrying about letting the auto industry fall apart because of a hiccup in sourcing cobalt, the idea was to mark off a zone—a warehouse, a port—where the rules were off and taxes were collected only on the outgoing final product.
As fine art became extraordinarily expensive over the last quarter century, the idea of parking your collection in a freeport became alluring. One painting could enter the freeport and change hands innumerable times—and taxes paid only when the painting left. You can imagine the potential for shenanigans.
Imagine people did: it’s not clear that storing an “investment Impressionist” like Logan Roy did makes any financial sense. But the fantasy of the freeport took hold—and a rash of warehouse-sized Free Trade Zones proliferated.
We know that the value of freeports is limited because demand failed to chase the explosion. The phenomenon peaked shortly before the pandemic, and it’s been downhill ever since. “Bluntly,” as one British study put it, “as UK tariffs are already very low, the customs benefits derived from location within the Freeport for business, would not be very high.”11 In 2018, there were 5,400 in the world—now it’s about 3,500.12 In a world before a trade-war of all against all—the global marketplace in the years between NAFTA and Brexit—the freeport wasn’t all that useful to the global art trade.
III. Manufacturing scarcity.
That time is over.
Chaos is determinative. If enforcement is uneven, if jurisdiction is unclear, if it’s all in a constant state of flux, that’s not just “guess and check”—that’s a sabotage of the integrated artworld that has developed over the past quarter century.
“Big deal,” you might say. “This is a 1% problem. Let those fat cats eat the cost.” Sad news: it’s not the 1% that will have to shift. The mega galleries and the top auction houses have outposts on every continent for a reason: where smaller galleries rely upon art fairs to extend their reach,13 the megas have an in-house global trade network—freeport mundi. That means an old song will be sung in a growing crescendo: a hyper-elevation of a shrinking number of global bluechip brands—and a devastating whack to everyone outside that circle.
Which is the point of tariffs: manufactured scarcity. Welcome to a new world—smaller in every dimension.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
The Freeport idea was the centerpiece of Tenet, Chris Nolan’s perplexing meditation on art storage and fire suppression.
The Bouvier affair seems an eternity ago, with much of the action completed by the time of this 2016 New Yorker gloss—but the legal entanglements only wrapped up last year.
Season 4, Episode 4, summarized here.
I don’t have an artworld angle on it, but I thought season three of White Lotus was fantastic, as usual. I may be in lonely territory here, but I think the show’s startling consistency is an asset, adding a Buñuel-esque taste of inescapability to purgatory.
Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024, p. 39, available here.
Join a livestream tour this morning, at 9:30 EST, here.
Kelly Ho, “‘We will remain unchanged’: Hong Kong vows to remain a free port as gov’t calls new US tariffs a ‘bullying’ act,” Hong Kong Free Press, April 6, 2025.
Already-out-of-date: “Trump’s New China Tariffs Sow Confusion, but There Are Big Art Exceptions,” Artnet.com, Feb. 12, 2025.
“Whatever Happened to Freeports?” July 2, 2024.
I ran long here and didn’t get to talk about the modern marvel of Temporary Import, which deserves its own post, and will get one soon.