> Yet the most troubling examples of the exploitation of art for financial gain are perfectly legal. As Adam outlines, collectors and their agents have continua

> Yet the most troubling examples of the exploitation of art for financial gain are perfectly legal. As Adam outlines, collectors and their agents have continually found creative ways to use their art holdings to defer paying taxes, including the establishment of private museums and foundations, storing artworks in offshore freeports where they can be exchanged without incurring customs duties or VAT, and loopholes in the tax code such as “like-kind” exchanges. Originally set up in the 1920s to aid farmers by enabling them to defer taxes on livestock trades, “like-kind exchanges” are now regularly invoked by art collectors in order to avoid paying taxes on the sale of artworks: So long as a collector uses the proceeds of the sale of one work to purchase another within 180 days, the tax obligation can be perpetually kicked down the road. This may have been eliminated for art by the most recent US tax bill, or https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/your-money/taxes-real-estate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/your-money/taxes-real-est... seems to say so ("property" was changed to "real property"). The previous administration also wanted to end like-kind treatment for art https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/arts/design/tax-break-used-by-investors-in-flipping-art-faces-scrutiny.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/arts/design/tax-break-use... but without digging more, I assume changes proposed then didn't get enacted.