NY COURT WEIGHS IF LAP DANCE IS TAX-EXEMPT ART
BY MICHAEL VIRTANEN / ASSOCIATED PRESS
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — No one would confuse the Nite Moves strip club with the Bolshoi Ballet, but what the lap dancers do there is art and entitled to the same tax exemption other performances enjoy, a lawyer argued in what was surely one of the racier tax cases ever to go before New York’s highest court.
W. Andrew McCullough, an attorney for the suburban Albany strip joint, told the Court of Appeals on Wednesday that admission fees and lap dances at the club should be freed of state sales taxes under an exemption that applies to “dramatic or musical arts performances.”
“It’s definitely a form of art,” a dancer said Wednesday afternoon at Nite Moves, where there was only one customer. She declined to give her name, saying she has another, unrelated job. “Some girls are up there practicing for hours when nobody’s in here.”