INCOME TAX: GROSS INCOME – CAPITAL VERSUS REVENUE, PROFIT-MAKING SCHEME OR FIXED/FLOATING-CAPITAL TEST?

The question of whether a receipt or accrual is of a capital nature or not has vexed the courts, legal minds and tax advisors for years. Simplifying or limiting the tests would provide greater certainty. According to some writers, the case of CIR v Pick ’n PayEmployee Share Purchase Trust (1992 4 SA 39 (A), 54 SATC 271, hereinafter “Pick ’n Pay”) seems to have finally limited the test incapital/revenue cases to the “profit-making scheme” test. However, in subsequent cases there is no suggestion that the scheme ofprofit-making test is the sole test. In Berea Park Avenue Properties (Pty) Ltd v CIR (1995 2 SA 11, 57 SATC 167) it is clear that the Appellate Division (as it then was) considered a profit-making scheme and trading stock in one breath, so to speak. In SARS v Knuth and Industrial Mouldings (Pty) Ltd (1999 62 SATC 65), a case heard in the Eastern Cape Provincial Division of the High Court dealt with the proceeds of the sale of shares. The case was concerned with the floating versus fixed-capital test, and Leach J opined (72) that the distinction“is often referred to in tax cases and can now be regarded as entrenched in our law”. Leach J referred to Pick ’n Pay, but only to the extent that sound commercial and good sense should prevail in selecting the tests applicable. It was held in Pick ’n Pay that if there is no trading then there can be no floating capital. The trading stock definition was not considered in the majority judgment. The profit-making scheme test is only one way of establishing that an asset is trading stock. An asset acquired for the purpose of sale is tradingstock and the proceeds are gross income. That should, it is submitted, be the basis on which capital/revenue cases are decided. The scheme of the profit-making test is but one method of establishing intention at acquisition. It is submitted that the intention to make a profit, inherent in the concept of a profit-making scheme, is not essential to establish trading. “Gross income” is receipts and accruals, not profits. The majority judgment in this case is, it is submitted, flawed in that it did not consider this reality. For years the courts have vacillated between the “floating capital/fixed capital” and “profit-making scheme” tests to establish whether the proceeds of the disposal of an asset is of a capital or revenue nature for the purpose of establishing gross income as defined in the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962. Pick ’n Pay seems to have finally limited the test of whether proceeds are of a capital or revenue nature to the “profit-making scheme” test. This note questions that submission by examining the concepts and application of the two tests, trading stock, Pick ’n Pay and subsequent capital/revenue cases.

Lever House, el rascacielos de cristal

Este artículo asume a la arquitectura moderna como un tema nodal en la conformación de la disciplina, aún en permanente revisión y debate[1]. Se propone reflexionar sobre los materiales del proyecto, entendidos como los recursos específicos de un hacer, a partir de analizar y reflexionar sobre el edificio en torre para las Oficinas para la sede principal de la empresa de jabón, de origen británico, “Lever Brother Company”, conocido como “Lever House” proyectado y construido el estudio de arquitectura norteamericano SOM, durante 1951 y 1952, en la ciudad de New York, en el 390 de la Avenida Park Avenue. [1] Ana María Rigotti.

Events: entre la práctica artística y la práctica curatorial

Las colaboraciones de Merce Cunningham con artistas innovadores de todas las disciplinas han redefinido la manera de experimentar las artes visuales y del espectáculo, al proponer una gran cantidad de desvíos respecto de otras prácticas escénicas e incluso desarrollando novedosos dispositivos de presentación de su propio material. Me propongo abordar el formato denominado Event (Evento) cuyo surgimiento se encuentra ligado a una peculiar forma de presentar su trabajo fuera del espacio escénico tradicional. Abordaré los planteos sobre género y estilo realizados por Oscar Steimberg para reflexionar sobre el estatuto de este formato poniendo en paralelo la serie Beacon Events y el Park Avenue Armory Event. La primera propuesta fue realizada por Cunningham y la segunda estuvo a cargo de Robert Swinston, factor que nos permitiría abordar dos posibilidades con relación al mismo formato: sus particularidades como práctica artística y las implicancias de analizarlo como práctica curatorial. A partir de la confrontación de estos casos, desarrollaré los posibles cruces entre los aspectos curatoriales de una práctica artística (en el caso de las creaciones de Cunningham) y los aspectos artísticos de una práctica curatorial (con relación al uso de esta modalidad por parte del Merce Cunningham Trust).

Sourcing the source: Bald eagle jasper quarries and the houserville habitation complex

The construction of a road extension of Park Avenue through the Pennsylvania State University’s agricultural fields offered an opportunity to reinvestigate, in more detail, the Tudek jasper quarry site (36CE238). The original investigation was led by Dr. James Hatch and graduate students from the University’s Department of Anthropology. Initial studies yielded in excess of 27,000 artifacts that were used in this analysis. Our reinvestigation resulted in the construction of a detailed outline of the quarry site and the pattern of usage of the materials from the site. Additionally, radiocarbon dating indicated that the site was intensively utilized for a long period of time (3500 BC to 1500 AD) and confirmed that, like many quarry sites, the activities included primary materials collection and testing, reduction of the lithic materials for transport to another location where the final finishing of tools took place. Moreover, the availability of raw material likely changed through time and across the quarry. Observed color changes in the jasper suggest some heat treatment on site, primarily during later time periods.

Snapshots of Indian Otherness in Aparna Sen’s Cinema

Aparna Sen turned to film directing in 1980 after a highly successful career as an actor. Her debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) highlights the loneliness of an elderly Anglo-Indian woman. One of her best-known films outside India is Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002), in which an upper caste Hindu woman saves the life of a Muslim stranger in an act of personal commitment with the Other. In 15 Park Avenue (2005), a film that focusses on schizophrenia, Sen shows how the female members of a family struggle to cope with mental illness. In this article I discuss how Sen explores different ways of being Indian in these three films and how she draws attention to values such as personal commitment and tenacity in the face of disability, ageing and communalism

The Only Wonderful Things

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

“We Are the Only Wonderful Things”

After losing their Greenwich Village apartment in 1927, Cather and Lewis had no permanent home in New York City, living together instead at the Grosvenor Hotel when both were in the city. In 1932, they finally leased an apartment on Park Avenue. The first half of this chapter reconstructs their life together in the 1930s and 1940s living on Park Avenue and traveling to Europe and Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The chapter includes their responses to the Great Depression and World War II, the formation of new friendships and maintenance of old ones, the deeper intertwining of their families, and Cather’s declining health. After describing Cather’s death and burial, the second half of the chapter tells the story of Edith Lewis’s mourning for Cather in the years immediately after Cather’s death and her work as Cather’s literary executor.

Afterword

On 17 December 2016, I had the good fortune to see a video installation at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Written, directed, and produced by Julian Rosefeldt, largely in and around Berlin, Manifesto staged thirteen scenarios—simultaneously looped on massive screens in the cavernous armory—in which extracts from nearly seventy avant-garde manifestos were performed by Cate Blanchett, featured in thirteen strikingly different roles. Her virtuosity redeployed even the most emphatic manifesto rhetoric into monologues that seem spontaneously uttered in a series of vivid locales, ranging from a cemetery to a fertilizer factory, a film studio, a drab apartment block, a former Olympic village, a puppet workshop, a recycling facility, and more. Blanchett, in effect, perpetuates the spirit of Fernando Pessoa, as if she were embodying heteronyms, not playing roles. ...