Recently, there has been a lot of attention on paintings fetching extremely high prices at auctions. Some of these paintings are exported once the sale is complete. In fact, the United States has exported an impressive $48.2 billion* in paintings over the last decade (2003-2013). Take a look at the graph below to see the trend:

As you can see, the collection of export statistics for paintings is separated by whether they were produced domestically or in a foreign country.

• Total Exports of Domestic Paintings (2003-2013)= $24.9 Billion**
• Total Exports of Foreign Paintings (2003-2013)= $23.3 Billion**

While the difference seems relatively small, exports of domestic paintings exceeded exports of foreign paintings by $1.5 billion* over the last ten years.

1. Classification: For exports of paintings (both domestic and foreign), choose Schedule B Code 9701.10.0000.
2. Domestic/ Foreign Indicator: When you are filing electronic export information in the AES for paintings, make sure that you have the correct foreign or domestic indicator selected under Origin of Goods. See image from AESDirect below:

For domestic and foreign export data, please refer to “Merchandise Data” on the Census Bureau’s webpage Foreign Trade Data Products. For general information on how to obtain international trade data from USA Trade Online, contact the Data Dissemination Branch at 1-800-549-0595, option 4.

*Export data from USA Trade Online
**Domestic an foreign export data from Merchandise Data