A Case for the Art Market Integrity Act

Photo: I. Tarsis, Art Fair Blur

By Victoria Cook

The United States accounts for the largest share of the global art market, and yet remains conspicuously absent from the international regulatory consensus on Anti-Money Laundering (AML). Efforts to address this issue, most recently through the Art Market Integrity Act (AMIA), introduced as S. 2400 in the Senate in 2025, would close that gap by bringing U.S. art market participants (AMPs) under the same kind of oversight already applied in the EU and U.K.. The 2025 bill has faced pointed criticisms including the cost to small businesses and collectors, the scale of the underlying risk, and the motivations of some of its advocates. But evidence from comparable jurisdictions and US regulatory findings suggest these concerns, while legitimate, do not outweigh the case for greater oversight. The AMIA offers tangible benefits for the art market: greater regulatory uniformity, transparency, and enhanced record-keeping that would, at long last, deny easy access to a historically opaque trade.