The definition of art in the customs law – Cristina Sala

This article deals with the difficulties arising from the collision of two different worlds: on one side, the creative and constantly-changing art world, on the other side the rational and crystallized legal world. In the last century, while international exchanges of artworks grew in importance and moved huge amounts of money throughout the globe, laws and regulations demonstrated their inability to deal with it.

This work focuses on cross-borders issues arising from the lack of a common understanding of what is art among legal people and art experts.

The purpose is to analyse the legal rules at the basis of customs classifications and to compare them with the application of those rules made by Courts. Finally, the last chapter, starting from a review of what previously described, offers some possible solutions to avoid that law keeps being an obstacle to the artworks trade flow.

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