NEW YORK TIMES | By GRAHAM BOWLEY and PATRICIA COHEN
EUGENE, Ore. — The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, tucked into a quiet corner of a college campus here in the hills of the Pacific Northwest, is hardly the epicenter of the art world. Yet major collectors, fresh from buying a Warhol or a Basquiat or another masterpiece in New York, routinely choose this small, elegant redbrick building at the University of Oregon to first exhibit their latest trophy.
The museum’s intimacy and scholarship are likely to play some role in their choice. But a primary lure for the collectors is often something more prosaic: a tax break.
Collectors who buy art in one state but live in another can owe thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of dollars in state “use taxes”: taxes often incurred when someone ships an out-of-state purchase home. But if they lend the recently purchased work first to museums like the Schnitzer, located in a handful of tax-friendly states, the transaction is often tax-free.
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