Creative Cogitation

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.