Creative Cogitation

My day job is a  tax accoun­tant.  I spe­cial­ize in small busi­nesses.  Time and again I am told things like “I am not that orga­nized,” asked “Why can’t I take the deduc­tion?”, and “Why do I need receipts, all my receipts?” etc.

Rule num­ber 1. In gen­eral, for tax pur­poses, there is no deduc­tion with­out doc­u­men­ta­tion.  Doc­u­men­ta­tion con­sists of receipts, invoices, state­ments, can­celed checks, logs for listed prop­erty (auto­mo­biles, cell phones, com­put­ers and enter­tain­ment equip­ment) etc.  From these lit­tle bits a book­keeper or accoun­tant can gen­er­ate a set of books and cre­ate finan­cial state­ments for you, but I real­ize many of you out there read­ing this do not have a book­keeper or accoun­tant.  So you will have to DIY, or you will have to bring the shoe­box of your stuff to your tax per­son at year’s end.

Your tax pre­parer should ask you if you have receipts.  We don’t usu­ally need to see them, unless we have rea­son to believe you are being dis­hon­est with us, (“Yeah, that that boat I bought is only for busi­ness pur­poses.”) or unless we are deal­ing with your shoe box because you have not cre­ated a real­is­tic profit and loss state­ment from those records.  If you hand over the shoe box, I gotta tell you, if it ain’t in there you are not get­ting the deduction.

“How bad can it be? I didn’t make that much”. As a self-employed artist, even if you did not make enough money to pay income taxes on, you will still owe self-employment taxes.  That’s right-you still owe money.  If you made $5000 total from sell­ing your art in a given year then your Uncle Sugar wants 15.3% of it or $706–not includ­ing income tax; you may owe another $500 in income tax or more depend­ing on your mar­ginal tax rate.  If you didn’t keep your receipts then you will not be able to deduct any of your expenses for cre­at­ing that income from that income. So get that shoe box out and start fill­ing it up.

Lets get back to the hypo­thet­i­cal $5,000 in sales.  For the sake of argu­ment lets your work is very detailed an you spent a lot of time cre­at­ing it, in addi­tion to time spent mar­ket­ing for shows, con­tact­ing col­lec­tors, work­ing with your gallery etc.  Lets say had the fol­low­ing expenses: $1000 in mate­ri­als, $100 in brushes & other small tools and equip­ment, $62 for a sales tax license, accoun­tant you paid $200 last year to do your sched­ule C, 1065 or 1120S, cell phone $50 per month, a web­site that costs $500 per year,$500 for the art-show fees, drove 100 miles each way to the fair where you sold that art,  rented a motel room for $80 per night for 2 nights and ate mod­estly at $40 a day for a three day show, that you drove an addi­tional 500 miles for busi­ness meet­ings with col­lec­tors, gallery own­ers, buy­ing sup­plies etc. Lets say that your car had 8000 miles total for the entire year.

• Mate­r­ial par­tic­i­pa­tion: You do work at your art busi­ness don’t you?  If you don’t then cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions apply, which are beyond the scope of this discussion.
• You expect to turn a profit don’t you?  Deduct­ing expenses directly from income is for folks who have the profit motive.  If you are a hob­by­ist and not really try­ing to turn a profit then you can only take expenses up to the income from your hobby sub­ject to the 2% lim­i­ta­tion of income if you item­ize deduc­tions on your per­sonal tax return; if you do not item­ize there is no deduc­tion at all.  Busi­ness own­ers get to deduct busi­ness expenses directly from income on their sched­ule C or other busi­ness return, but you have to have the profit motive.
• Art is a funny busi­ness for tax pur­poses as we get to expense the mate­ri­als we used in mak­ing our art.  A lot of other busi­nesses don’t get to do that, they can only take the expense for mate­ri­als in their prod­ucts after they sell it–in the mean time it is nond­e­ductible inven­tory.  Lucky us.  We get to take the whole $1000 in mate­ri­als expenses this year.
• Small tools and equip­ment:  In real­ity they usu­ally last more than a year — if they don’t they are deductible as sup­plies, but if they do last longer (just how long have you had your favorite paint brush?), you are sup­posed to depre­ci­ate them over time.  The IRS will tell you the time it takes and how to do it.  Things not oth­er­wise spec­i­fied have 7-year recov­ery peri­ods.   BUT if you have net income you may be able to take the entire expense in the year of pur­chase via some­thing called sec­tion 179.  This exam­ple does have net income, so your tax pre­parer could com­plete a form that would allow you to deduct your small tools as an expense in the year of pur­chase, instead of depre­ci­at­ing this pal­try $100 amount for a over time.
• $500 in art show fees, $500 the web­site, $62 sales tax, $200 to your accoun­tant is account­ing fees are all rea­son­able and nec­es­sary expenses for your busi­ness & are nor­mal deduc­tions for tax purposes.
• The cell phone — does your bill break out the calls you made?  If it does you should fig­ure out the per­cent­age of calls that are busi­ness verses per­sonal.  The busi­ness per­cent­age is deductible (assum­ing it is not your only phone) and the per­sonal usage is not.  Don’t want to mess with it? Don’t expect to be able to take the deduc­tion at all.  Con­sider, if you use your cell phone 50% for busi­ness then that rep­re­sents $300 in expense you could use to off­set your income, that is rep­re­sents about $46 in self-employment tax and maybe another $30 in income tax or more depend­ing on your mar­ginal tax rate.  If your bill doesn’t break out the phone num­bers called then you need to keep a writ­ten log; its prob­a­bly worth it to call your cell phone provider and see if they can give you access to a detailed log so you can fig­ure it out instead of try­ing to keep a log of your calls.
• The travel expenses: $160 in accom­mo­da­tion and $120 in meals.  If you have a tax home, that is to say you are not one of those peo­ple who only lives in a town for a few weeks before mov­ing on, you maybe able to deduct cer­tain travel expenses if the travel is for busi­ness, overnight and more than 50 miles from your tax home.  If you have a tax home then this trip may be deductible as busi­ness travel.  There are a lot more rules but that is the short form of it.  So the $160 in hotel fees is com­pletely deductible, but the meals are only 50% deductible — this case is usu­ally the case for any meals or enter­tain­ment deduc­tion; if you keep your receipts you get another $60 deduc­tion for your meals on the road for busi­ness travel.
• The auto­mo­bile mileage:  You had 700 busi­ness miles and 8000 miles total.  Your busi­ness usage is not even 10% so tak­ing auto­mo­bile depre­ci­a­tion is out, but if you keep a writ­ten log which includes the year’s start­ing and end­ing mileage, the start­ing and end­ing mileage of each busi­ness trip, the date of each trip, the busi­ness pur­pose of each trip, and you use fewer than 5 vehi­cles for busi­ness pur­poses you may qual­ify for the mileage deduc­tion.  Sim­ply put instead of track­ing gas, oil, insur­ance etc, you just keep track of your mileage, which you have to do any­way if you are going to take any deductible expenses for the busi­ness use of your per­sonal vehi­cle.  In 2009 that rate is 55 cents per mile or $385 in mileage expenses.  Don’t want to keep a log? Then don’t expect to be able to deduct those expenses.  That is another $59 in self employ­ment tax and maybe another $38 in income tax or more depend­ing on your mar­ginal tax rate.

So you can reduce your income by $2582 by sav­ing receipts and another $685 by keep­ing a mileage log and fig­ur­ing out busi­ness self phone use.  That’s about $500 in self-employment tax and and maybe another $327 in income tax or more depend­ing on your mar­ginal tax rate.  Lets com­pare: $1206 tax verses $379 tax.  You have to ask your­self, come tax time is it worth it to keep your receipts, mileage log and fig­ure your busi­ness per­cent­age of cell phone use? Only you can answer that ques­tion, but many peo­ple I know have enough trou­ble cough­ing up $379, let alone $1206.  Also if you didn’t pay esti­mated taxes on that $5000 in income you may also owe a penalty and inter­est on that $1206. Why? Our tax sys­tem is pay as you go; safe har­bor is under $1000 (OR 90% of all of your taxes owed for the cur­rent year OR 100% of the tax you owed last year unless you earned more than $150,000 then its 110%).    In this par­tic­u­lar exam­ple keep­ing receipts and logs not only reduced the tax lia­bil­ity but also kept it low enough to stay within esti­mated tax pay­ment safe harbor.

Where to start?

1. Get a file, a box an enve­lope or some­thing and start keep­ing all of your busi­ness receipts, state­ments, invoices etc. NOW.
2. Poor man’s busi­ness account­ing sys­tem:  There are sev­eral banks out there with free check­ing accounts-you may be able to open one with as lit­tle as $100 and run it down to noth­ing reg­u­larly with­out incur­ring fees (just don’t over­draft it-then they really ham­mer you).  Get one for your busi­ness.  In real­ity it should be a busi­ness account, but that may involve addi­tional paper­work and expense; for the pur­poses of this dis­cus­sion if you’re a Sched­ule C filer with­out an Employer Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Num­ber, an indi­vid­ual account may work just as well as long as you use it only for busi­ness expenses and income.  Get this account at a dif­fer­ent finan­cial insti­tu­tion from the one you cur­rently bank with if at all pos­si­ble.  Once you have that account, deposit all money you receive for your goods and ser­vices as the result of your busi­ness into that account and use those funds to pay for your busi­ness expenses out of that same account.  Do not pay for your mort­gage, elec­tric bill, car pay­ment, lunch with Lucy or any other per­sonal expenses from this account; if you need money write your­self a draw, or pay­check, deposit it into your per­sonal account and pay your per­sonal expenses out of your per­sonal bank account.  If you need to loan your busi­ness money, loan the money for­mally: Pre­pare a promis­sory note, with pay­ment terms and inter­est, and only then write a check to the busi­ness and deposit it in your busi­ness account.  If you need to buy some­thing small for the busi­ness out of your own pocket, sub­mit the receipt to your busi­ness (file it in your shoe box) with a request for reim­burse­ment (post-it note — “pay myself back for this”), but do not make a habit of pay­ing for busi­ness expenses with per­sonal funds; it is best to pay for busi­ness expenses out of busi­ness funds.  If you keep all of your receipts, and use the busi­ness account only for busi­ness pur­poses, you will have at least a min­i­mum amount of infor­ma­tion to fig­ure out profit and loss from busi­ness and pay your taxes.
3. Start keep­ing logs for listed prop­erty: I hear, “I am not that orga­nized, I don’t want to keep a log.”  My response is, “That is your choice, but you will not be able to take deduc­tions against your income for the busi­ness use of your car, your cell phone, your com­puter or your cam­era.”  The log could just be a flip book you write the infor­ma­tion in, but many office sup­ply stores carry inex­pen­sive mileage log books you can use as well. Just make sure the log and a pen is with the listed prop­erty at all times so you will remem­ber to use it.

One final note:  Keep your receipts, invoices, bills, check stubs, state­ments etc.  with your tax forms.  Just because you have used them to fig­ure out your taxes doesn’t mean you are done with them.  You may have to pro­duce these items if you are audited so don’t throw them away.

The usual dis­claimers: Although Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC has made every effort to insure the accu­racy of this infor­ma­tion, mis­in­for­ma­tion, dis­in­for­ma­tion, changes, mis­takes, typos and hack­ers hap­pen, there­fore Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC takes no respon­si­bil­ity for any action taken or results based on the infor­ma­tion sup­plied here in.   Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice Cir­cu­lar 230 Dis­clo­sure:  As pro­vided for in Trea­sury reg­u­la­tions, advice (if any) relat­ing to fed­eral taxes that is con­tained in this com­mu­ni­ca­tion (includ­ing attach­ments) is not intended or writ­ten to be used, and can­not be used for the pur­pose of (1) avoid­ing penal­ties under the Inter­nal Rev­enue Code or (2) pro­mot­ing, mar­ket­ing or rec­om­mend­ing to another party any plan or arrange­ment address herein.  Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC cur­rently does not have a cer­ti­fied pub­lic accoun­tant or an attor­ney on staff; this infor­ma­tion is purely for edu­ca­tional pur­poses and not to be con­strued as legal or finan­cial advice. Art & Busi­ness Con­sult­ing LLC and its employ­ees, mem­bers and asso­ciates are not engage to prac­tice law; you always should dis­cuss legal mat­ters with your attor­ney before talk­ing to any­one else.

I love cre­at­ing.  I have to cre­ate.  If I could find a way to con­tin­u­ously paint or what­ever and keep a roof over my head, food in my belly and keep myself in art sup­plies, I would.   I am still work­ing on that.  A lot of my pre­vi­ous writ­ings have been about the busi­ness side of what I am try­ing to do, but I really would like to write more about the cre­ative process.

I have stuff that wants to get out.  It has to be expressed.  I have a need to do this thing.  It is very frus­trat­ing not to be able to do it and I have been frus­trated a very long time.  I was a good stu­dent, but I was always doo­dling in class.  I don’t doo­dle much any­more as my cre­ative time is very lim­ited these days.  I think I would like to doo­dle again.

The Ran­dom Reverie part of the blog is for peo­ple who have the same need as me, the need to cre­ate.  It’s a very spe­cial brand of insan­ity.   I have to be insane to want to keep doing some­thing like this after hav­ing my pegs knocked out from under me again and again.

These days when I decide to art, I art; I don’t want to lose the spirit of the thing before it gets done.  I have to focus intensely as my time is lim­ited.  Just like many of you I also have to keep doing the stuff that keeps the roof over my head, the lights on, food in my belly, food in my crit­ters’ bel­lies etc. The way I accom­plish my goal is through my process.

I usu­ally do some prepa­ra­tions before I paint as I gen­er­ally need to know where my paint­ing is going before I lay brush to can­vas, but I do not spend so much time prepar­ing that I don’t get to the can­vas.  Recently I built a skele­ton of a dragon out of pipe clean­ers so I could fig­ure out how the dragon would work. I did sev­eral sketches then loaded the result into Pho­to­Shop to do my lay­out and fool with the col­ors.  I’ve cre­ated trans­par­ent over­lays so I can see how the lay­out is inter­act­ing with the Golden Mean and the the­o­ret­i­cal ideal loca­tions of focal point.  A lot of times it is spot on, but some­times I break the rules.  Once I start paint­ing it usu­ally goes pretty fast.  That is my process, but it may not be yours.  I know sev­eral other artist’s whose tech­nique for get­ting it done is the com­plete oppo­site of mine; maybe they flip on their favorite tunes, spend some time select­ing their pal­let then let the brush and the paint on the can­vas tell them where they are going, let the his­tory develop real-time.  (Some­times I do it that way too.) The point: You have to have a process for get­ting it done, a cre­ative work ethic if you will.  I can’t tell you what that process will be as you need to fig­ure it out for your­self.  If you do not have the will to fin­ish what you start, if you do not have a process that leads to com­pleted work, then you prob­a­bly will not get it done.  Your process may change over time. Your process may vary.  The goal is to get it done, get it out, com­plete the thought of the moment and set if free.

Focus serves another pur­pose as well.  When you are con­cen­trat­ing on your art, you are not indif­fer­ent, you are set­ting your cre­ative ani­mal free.  It doesn’t mat­ter what you pro­duce, it mat­ters that you care about what you syn­the­size.  Some artists do pure abstracts while oth­ers do photo-realistic still-life, some artists paint por­traits while oth­ers paint big-eyed char­ac­tures, some artists paint cityscapes while oth­ers do pas­toral scenes, some artists paint ani­mals while oth­ers paint flow­ers, some artist don’t paint at all, they do car­toons, sculp­ture, jew­elry, quilts.  No mat­ter what the result, there will be those who like it. But there will be  those who can’t stand it; they are not your con­cern.  Your con­cern con­vey­ing your pas­sion to your audi­ence.  If you don’t enjoy it, if it is just a job, I think it will show.  If you do not feel enthu­si­as­tic about what you are doing, I think that the con­nois­seurs of your sub­ject mat­ter will be able to tell.  Art must come from the heart.

PS.  As you cre­ate, you may be tempted to go fool with some­thing that you pre­vi­ously com­pleted.  I would say, “Don’t do that!”  The com­pleted thing is a com­pleted thought at that moment.  If you want to change some­thing, start a brand new thought.  Before you know it you may have a series.  You can learn a lot about your process while you explore vari­a­tions on a theme.  One thing that I have dis­cov­ered over time is that the paint­ing I like in a series, the one that I think most com­pletely expresses my thought of the moment, is very sel­dom the one that is the most pop­u­lar with my patrons.  Imag­ine if I had painted it over  in an attempt to per­fect my thought instead of let­ting it be; I would never find that my col­lec­tors had dif­fer­ent ideas.

Yours in art — Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

So I admit it. I am a geek.  The beauty of the num­bers has long fas­ci­nated me.   It is one of the rea­sons I wound up get­ting an advanced degree in physics.  I con­sid­ered engi­neer­ing,  math­e­mat­ics, and even art as my col­lege major, but physics won out on the fun fac­tor.  Engi­neer­ing was too pedes­trian, Art too risky, and the math­e­mati­cians I saw really didn’t look like they were hav­ing a good time.  I wound up get­ting a mas­ters degree in nuclear physics. but I am not doing any­thing with it these days.  If I can say one thing about get­ting a mas­ters degree (which prob­a­bly applies to any mas­ters degree, not just physics) is that grad­u­ate school taught me to think, to use the tools my under­grad­u­ate degree gave me.  Physics taught me to look at the big pic­ture as many solu­tions to Physics prob­lems apply to a great many very dif­fer­ent types of problems.

But I digress, I really still am a beauty of the num­bers gal.

So one prob­lem, which is kind of like the prob­lem of all prob­lems, is the P verses NP prob­lem.  What is P verses NP? In a nut­shell, the big ques­tion is whether P = NP or P ≠NP;  if P = NP then every prob­lem has a effi­cient solu­tion and we can find it effi­ciently. One might pos­tu­late all prob­lems are solv­able in an infi­nite amount of time, but what good is that?  Only God, per­haps, has an infi­nite amount of time to solve prob­lems; in the real world prob­lems need to be solved in a finite and rea­son­able amount of time. The amount of time is the crux of P verses NP. Are prob­lems really as com­plex as they appear? Is the only solu­tion brute force over an infi­nite amount of time?

By way of exam­ple, con­sider we have a large num­ber of wed­ding guests we need to seat at tables at the recep­tion.  We might want to pair them up into groups of two peo­ple who like each other, so that no one is lonely.  In 1965 a guy named Jack Edmonds devel­oped an effi­cient algo­rithm to solve this par­tic­u­lar prob­lem, and hav­ing an effi­cient algo­rithm means, among other things, you can feed it to a com­puter and solve the prob­lem in a rea­son­able amount of time. Jack Edmonds pio­neered the lingo for P verses NP.  Prob­lems with effi­cient solu­tions are the “P”, in P verses NP.  This par­tic­u­lar prob­lem is called the “match­ing problem.”

But there are many other ways to seat our large num­ber of wed­ding guests that are by far more dif­fi­cult to solve.  Sup­pose we want to make groups of three wed­ding guests who like each other, OR large groups of wed­ding guests who like each other, OR we want to seat guests around a round table such that guests, who can’t stand each other, are not seated next to each other, OR group  three cou­ples at the wed­ding with other cou­ples in a mutu­ally agree­able tri­ads, OR the evil con­verse social sci­ence exper­i­ment where only guests who can’t stand each other are grouped together in one way or another (hey, maybe the wed­ding plan­ner has a thing for the groom).  All the prob­lems that have effi­cient, ver­i­fi­able solu­tions are “NP”.

So if P = NP then every prob­lem has an effi­ciently ver­i­fi­able solu­tion AND we can find it effi­ciently.  On the tech­ni­cal side, even if this state­ment is true, we still may not have the algo­rithm to effi­ciently solve a given prob­lem. The P verses NP prob­lem is an abstrac­tion, there­fore just because we may do some­thing doesn’t nec­es­sary mean that we can…

Nat­u­rally this ques­tion has ram­i­fi­ca­tions well beyond com­put­ing algo­rithms, such as math­e­mat­i­cal proofs, encryp­tion, DNA sequenc­ing etc.

Why think about it at all?  The P verses NP prob­lem is one of the seven Clay Math­e­mat­ics Insti­tute Mil­len­nium Prize prob­lems; solv­ing it is worth $1,000,000.  Not a bad chunk of change, but also real­ize prov­ing P = NP  might solve other Mil­len­nium Prize prob­lems as well, each worth $1,000,000.  How­ever you should know that many the­o­rists believe P ≠NP. Don’t get your hopes up.

So I am invited to attend this art show, the Bien­nale Inter­nazionale dell’Arte Con­tem­po­ranea di Firenze, in Italy in Decem­ber 2009.  It is an honor, and a phe­nom­e­nal oppor­tu­nity, but I am just begin­ning to grasp what a pain in the behind inter­na­tional ship­ping is.

In order to ship for this show, the art has to be received by Ital­ian cus­toms on a cer­tain date, stored, then be made avail­able for hang­ing at the show on a cer­tain date.  It also has to be removed imme­di­ately after the show and shipped back.  Because of all these tim­ing con­straints I feel com­pelled to use the shipper/freight for­warder advised by the show.  I will have to pay what ever they charge.  So much for shop­ping around.

I have to mark the art as For Exhi­bi­tion Only, but in spite of that I will have to front the Value Added Tax (VAT ) as part of my ship­ping costs, just on the off chance my art sells at the exhi­bi­tion.  The VAT is 20% of the value of the art­work.  It is not an insignif­i­cant amount. It will be refunded, they say, when the art­work is shipped back home.

I have to sup­ply 8x10 images of my art­work in trip­li­cate with the paper­work.  The paper­work is also in trip­li­cate.  They also require a copy of my pass­port and a self-certification that:

• I cre­ated the art,
• it is not more than 50 years old,
• and that I am a par­tic­i­pant in the show

The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is also in trip­li­cate (and accord­ing to recent infor­ma­tion must be signed in blue ink-whatever).  By the way, the return paper­work also requires trip­li­cate of the self cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, ship­ping doc­u­ments and 8x10 images of the art­work.  We are basi­cally talk­ing 6 copies of every­thing.   That is a lot of paper­work includ­ing 18 8x10 pho­tographs of the art.

The ship­ping mate­ri­als have to be re-usable or I will incur the costs of repack­ing the art for return ship­ment.  Who knows how much that will cost if I have to buy the mate­ri­als in Italy.  At first I thought of using U-Haul mir­ror boxes, but the ship­per has nixed that idea.  They want a crate, with screws (not nails) on one side, which is ISPM15 com­pli­ant.  Although a crate will be more durable, one thing that occurs to me is a crate is going to weigh more too.  I ini­tially guessti­mated the cost of ship­ping at $1200 (not includ­ing the VAT thing).  That is a lot of money to ship $3,000 worth of art­work, of course I would like to do it for less, but I am really hop­ing it does not cost sig­nif­i­cantly more.  Hey, I haven’t made it yet, this is a lot of money for me.

Then there is this ISPM15 com­pli­ant thing — what is that? Well suf­fice to say you will not likely be build­ing your own crate.  The wood used to make the crate has to be treated (fumi­gated) to spe­cific stan­dards. The wood so treated is spe­cially marked with the “bug” stamp.  If the crate doesn’t have a bug stamp on it, it will be quar­an­tined and fumi­gated when received in the for­eign coun­try.  My crater said the process pretty much destroys what­ever is pack­aged inside.

So I am off to find an ISPM15 com­pli­ant crater. I made a local search and even­tu­ally came up with three pos­si­bil­i­ties (mostly what you get when you search for ISPM15 crates is peo­ple who make pal­lets — not ter­ri­bly use­ful to me).  I con­tacted all three pos­si­ble ven­dors.  One never con­tacted me back, the sec­ond quoted me $237.50 for a crate weigh­ing 70 pounds, and the other Craters & Freighters (480) 966‑9929 quoted me $94 for a crate weigh­ing 50 pounds.  Need­less to say I am sen­si­tive to price and weight as the heav­ier the crate is the more it is going to cost me to ship.  These prices required me to deliver the art­work, let them pack it, and then come pick up the crated art­work.  They charge more if they come and get the art from you (about $70 dol­lars more, if you can do the drop and pickup your­self). Craters & Freighters (C&F) is lob­by­ing me for the priv­i­lege of ship­ping and I may or may not do that, but one thing about C&F is they lis­tened to me.  They were aware that I was sen­si­tive to the weight, that I needed to have a re-usable crate to these exact­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions and they deliv­ered.  The crate with the art­work inside weighs 34 pounds.  Their nor­mal turn around time is 2 days but they got me done faster (I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily expect that, but it was very nice of them). Just so you know, I am not affil­i­ated with C&F, they are not pay­ing me to say this stuff etc. This para­graph merely relates my expe­ri­ence with them. YMMV.

At the moment I am still wait­ing to hear back from the Ital­ian ship­ping com­pany.   I will update this blog later on when I final­ize the ship­ping plans, and if I think of it, I may even write about the total ship­ping expe­ri­ence when I get back from Italy.

UPDATE:  The Ital­ian Ship­ping Com­pany wanted more than my art was worth to han­dle the door to door ser­vices, $2370 plus $480 refund­able VAT.  Their basic ship­ping was $1830 includ­ing insur­ance; it is almost twice as much as cer­tain other ship­ping com­pa­nies  I surveyed-the other $540 is the ware­hous­ing and cus­toms fees exclud­ing the $480 refund­able VAT. Unfor­tu­nately sev­eral of the other com­pa­nies have proved down­right wishy washy when it comes to ensur­ing my art will make it through Ital­ian cus­toms to arrive at the Fortezza at the appointed time-they won’t guar­an­tee what day it will show up-lovely. One of them could not even give me a quote stat­ing “things could change between now and the ship­ping date.”  Fur­ther­more, since I had an account with them I could set it up such that the cus­toms fees could be charged via my account; in which case they could deal with the cus­toms issues, but they could not tell me what the cus­toms fees were going to be, nor would they set up the tem­po­rary import thing so I could get the VAT refunded.

I am con­tem­plat­ing just tak­ing the art on the plane with me as an over-sized bag fee is by far less expen­sive than any ship­ping options pro­posed.  I started research­ing the whole impor­ta­tion thing and seems I should be able to get a tem­po­rary import license for my art-I just don’t know how to do it yet, but I need to do it soon as it will take 15–40 days to get it.  Appar­ently the big rub has more to do with antiq­ui­ties and impor­tant works of art and less to do with VAT con­cerns.  I have a let­ter into the local Ital­ian Hon­orary Vice Con­sul ask­ing if I can just fly with my art, and  if there is any­thing I can do to ease my entry into Italy with my art.  Appar­ently leav­ing Italy with it should present no problem.

Any­way I have until Octo­ber 11, the drop dead date for the Ital­ian ship­per, to make up my mind.

Update: Octo­ber 2.  I took some­thing like 5 tries to get a con­tact with the US Ital­ian Con­sulate with­out it being kicked back etc.  I still have not heard from them, but at least my request for infor­ma­tion went through.  In the mean­time I have received a quote that is sub­stan­tially less than the Bien­nale rec­om­mended ship­pers from DHL.  I also am going to inves­ti­gate another local ship­per called Art Solutions.

I have talked to an artist who just got back from Italy.  She advises that many artists flew in with their work.  As far as that goes as the art as crated it will cost $370 to fly with round trip.  She advises hav­ing a pro­forma invoice with the art that lists NO COMMERCIAL VALUE what so ever. That is fair.  The Bien­nale is an Exhi­bi­tion, not an art sale; no prices will be listed.  I am con­sid­er­ing tak­ing the art off the stretcher bars so I can reduce the pack­ing to under 62 lin­eal inches.  If I can do that I may be able to fly it free.  That would likely be an 40 x 11 x 11 con­tainer perhaps-my long stretch­ers are 36 inches so there is noth­ing I can do about the length. Either way it looks like fly­ing in with it will be the most cost effec­tive method.

If I fly with the art as is, then another friend of mine has sug­gested mod­i­fy­ing the crate with a piano hinge on one side.  He says it will need to be opened sev­eral times on the trip by cus­toms offi­cials so a mil­lion screws (OK there are actu­ally 10, but his point is taken) is prob­a­bly not the best plan.

I am still con­sid­er­ing DHL, but this new infor­ma­tion has me con­tem­plat­ing fly­ing in with it more strongly.

Update: Octo­ber 6.  I am prob­a­bly fly­ing in with my art and it will have to be reassem­bled on site.  I have just expe­ri­ence another finan­cial set­back that is def­i­nitely seal­ing the deal.  At the moment I am look­ing for a gun case to ship the art in as they are long and skinny and may fit the bill with regard to the max­i­mum air­line dimen­sions.  I have friends who have guns so my first inquiry is with them, but if not then I may have to plan B it.  An alter­na­tive I am con­sid­er­ing is cob­bling some­thing together with a PVC tube, to pro­vide pro­tec­tive rigid­ity to the stretcher bars, or buy­ing inex­pen­sive com­mer­cially avail­able tubes and a soft-sided bag.; again sports equip­ment bags look to be ideal if I can find one in the appro­pri­ate dimen­sions.  A note about fly­ing with used gun bags — you prob­a­bly will have to open them for cus­toms as they will have gun pow­der residue which will likely set off the explo­sives detectors.

I am doing a sep­a­rate post about my ship­ping tube research.

Yours in Art…

–Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

PS. I am still look­ing for Spon­sors & Con­tribut­ing Patrons to help me pay the esti­mated $8000 it is going to cost me to attend this event.  Every lit­tle bit helps.

So I have decided to cre­ate a real blog.  The indi­vid­ual con­tent should be a lit­tle more focused than my other ran­dom thoughts posted infre­quently over the years and this forum should also be inter­ac­tive which is new to me.  So far the set up hasn’t been hor­ri­ble.  The basic pro­gram is sup­ported by my web­host.  What remains to be seen is how well the two spaces inter­act.  I could wind up delet­ing the whole shebang.

It has taken a while to fig­ure out how to get the API key, but I even­tu­ally did. If you are won­der­ing, in as much as I cre­ated the blog on my own site, I had to cre­ate a sep­a­rate Word­Press iden­tity.   I am cur­rently exper­i­ment­ing with the design of the blog start­ing with a prepack­aged theme.  I may or may not decide to tin­ker with it.  I am cer­tainly capa­ble of cre­at­ing the code, but I am rather more inter­ested using in the plug and “pray” aspects of using Word­Press at the moment.

This blog will really be a ran­dom foray into my topic du jour and that could lit­er­ally cover any­thing.  If this works out I might invest in some­thing that will simul­ta­ne­ously update MySpace, Face­Book etc.  Let me know what you think if you dare.  Or if the social media aspect of blog­ging is not your cup of tea, have a read, then just browse my web­site AKAJake.com.  Art, after all, is the dis­til­la­tion of a few of my thoughts du jour.

AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!