What Isn't Art?

For the artist, the critic and the public, the answers to "What is art?" are matters of widely different opinions. At U.S. customs, where in theory original works of art should pass duty free, the answers are red-tape snarls of contradiction and confusion. Last week two members of Congress set out to write some new official definitions.

Customs law covering original works of art has been unchanged since 1930. uses some definitions that date back to 1916, fails to take account of the revolution that has taken place in half a century of modern art. The travails that this situation causes an institution such as Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is enough to make Picasso turn primitive. The M.M.A. owns one Picasso collage (paste-up) valued at approximately $15,000, but by customs definition, it is not art at all. In the involved process of gathering works by famed French Abstractionist Jean Arp for a forthcoming retrospective, the museum found that Arp abstractions painted with oil on canvas can enter duty free, but an Arp collage (made of pasted doilies, tapestry and cloth) is dutiable. Arp's abstract marble, Configurations of Serpent Movements, was cleared because its title suggests it was modeled on "imitations of natural objects," whereas Arp's equally abstract Dream Amphora had to pay.

Sponsors of the congressional move to put an end to such silly distinctions are New York's Republican Senator Jacob K. Javits and New Jersey's Democratic Congressman Frank Thompson Jr. They introduced identical bills for major revision of the law to exempt from duty all works of art made of any material in any form. They would specifically exempt such hitherto excluded items as old primitive carvings, collages, lithographs, architects' models and modern tapestries.

Museum directors and gallery operators are expected to rally behind the Javits-Thompson effort, although they grant that many a sensible decision has been made under the present law. Case in point: when a batch of twelve "abstractions" by a London Zoo chimpanzee arrived in Baltimore, they were about to be passed as duty-free original works of art when customs inspectors identified the "artist." They assessed full duty, reasoning that when a chimp apes art, it isn't.

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