Are you looking properly after your Art Collection?
The press, the social media, our family, and friends, everything around us revolves around the coronavirus and how we can prevent it and protect us. In the next few weeks, we will be most of the time at home, trying to have the minimum contact with the exterior, to among all, stop the fast contagion, which is the most aggressive and worrying of this pandemic.
Looking at the positive side of these events, we will have time to share with our family, cook together, watch some movies, catch up in readings, and take care of our art collection.
Observing our pieces with calm, we can determine the needs we have for it, which our fast-paced life doesn’t allow us to attend.
Here you have some advice:
Organize the documents of your collection. Find the records you keep, such as invoices, certificates of authenticity, books, and catalogues in which your pieces have been reproduced, provenance documents. Do you have all the records? Are they digitalized? You will need to document as much as you can those pieces that have no information and obtain the necessary documents for those with incomplete information. Please make a free online appointment with our experts to establish the steps required to have your collection wholly documented.
Make sure that you have a complete inventory of all your pieces. An inventory includes digital photographs of all your pieces, from different angles, a comprehensive and professional registry of the information for each of them, and conservation reports of those you currently have in the collection. Expert Art Historians can make the inventory with all the essential information of your collection, organized and completely digitalized. A complete inventory is the first step for all the needs your collection will have in due time. Do you currently have an inventory? If you do, please talk to a consultant about the next steps for your collection.
Check your collection’s insurance policy. Your artworks should have an independent insurance policy. Often, we make the mistake of including them in the general insurance policy of our home and personal belongings, risking having an insurance policy that doesn’t cover our collection from natural disasters, theft, fire, or any other undesired event. Are you planning to relocate in the next months for personal or work reasons? If your collection is part of that relocation, it should travel insured, with the professional requirements that it implies, the first will be an appraisal with replacement costs for those pieces that will move.
Please make sure that your collection is appraised by a professional appraiser qualified to make different types of appraisals. Identify the appraisal needs you currently have. Do you need an insurance policy? Would you like to know the current market value of your whole collection? Do you want appraisals for a few pieces that you want to sell? Your collection is part of your legacy and should be appraised to be included in your will? Have you consider giving some of your pieces to your family, and want to know its value to be as fair as possible?
Gather and organize the documents for donated artworks, in preparation for the next tax return. In the last months, have you donated pieces from your collection to museums and nonprofit organizations and don’t have the professional appraisal and the necessary IRS Form for your tax return? If the pieces donated have a market value exceeding the $5,000.00, the IRS requires that your declaration includes an appraisal made by a certified appraiser and the 8283 Form completed and signed.
Most of these actions can be made from the distance by your consultants and professional appraisers. Identify your needs and plan to start fulfilling each of them. Be farsighted and make the necessary appointments for your appraiser in the next months. Finding a qualified appraiser with time available can be difficult when everything returns to normal, and tax season is at full speed.
Let stay safe at home and take the opportunity to grow and take the necessary precautions to continue enjoying that passion we all share for art and the history behind each piece we have acquired.
