What gets you in the muse?
Can it be someone? Another painting? Music? A view?
It appears that some artists get inspired by something completely different - Money.
Did you know that some of the art created today is created for/bought and sold for money laundering?
The concept is pretty simple: The world of art (With focus on paintings, statutes etc.) has a global market with many buyers and sellers from around the world, many of them willing and even aiming to pay high, and a lot of the paintings have a universal price tag, sometimes reaching millions of dollars in worth.
Another advantage of the market in terms of trading is the fact that once you have the art piece, you can transfer it with ease, usually without anyone even asking. If you’ll reach the airport with a suitcase full of 5 million dollars, you’re probably going to be asked to step up for an investigation. Going to the airport with painting worth 10 million dollars? Go ahead.
Once the art piece has moved to a different location, you can easily sell it without any need for any detailed or complex tax process (Sometimes not at all), thus allowing to launder money by buying and selling the art piece to others, and legally transferring the money for regular bank accounts, thus changing the money’s orientation to the “Good Side”. With that in mind, it seems that some of the biggest art collectors and even art galleries out there serve no more than an operation for money laundering.
Another method has the same first few steps in the making, but instead, the buyer loans money from the bank using the art as the collateral, thus earning clean cash with ease.
It’s hard to measure the impact in terms of money, but considering that an art piece can be sold for millions of dollars, it’s easy to calculate the value of money used reaching for at least tens of millions of dollars per year.
The next time you see an artist and think that he may have chosen the poor life, think again. You may see a part of an international organization that serves more money than you can imagine.