For Thierry Mestdagh, president of the House of Antiques of Belgium, and recently president of the International Chamber of Traders in Works of Art, no doubt, this European regulation has been poorly designed and implemented under conditions that it deems problematic.
And he gives a concrete example: “Work around this textrust-t-t-il, started eight years ago and the software user manual was only provided to us yesterday (Thursday June 26), at the day before the implementation.“Another error according to him,”fundamental“, “There was no educational work, no training“For professionals in the sector.
But, above all, he deplores that with these new rules, professionals in the sector will be faced with requests “who are absolutely impossible, to which we will not be able to answer“. Again, an example to better understand reasoning: an old (over 200 years) and expensive object (more than 18,000 euros).
“Imagine that this object comes from China, but is in the United States. The importer, whether Belgian, French or Spanish and who wishes to import this work, will have to ask China to find in a document issued by the country of origin. If this object was acquired by an American in the 1970s, you can imagine that there are no documents. So we are faced with an impossibility. You should know that a large number of works of art on the market have, unfortunately, an area blurred as for their origin.“
