The commission's insistence on seeing the Flavin and Viola installations purely as technical parts removed from any artistic context has raised eyebrows in artistic and judicial circles alike. Art lawyer Pierre Valentin, who represented Haunch of Venison in 2008 but is not involved in the current case, called the reasoning "absurd," according to the Art Newspaper. "To suggest, for example, that a work by Dan Flavin is a work of art only when switched on, is comical," he said. Valentin also referred to previous decisions by the U.K. and the Netherlands and said that this ruling conflicts with previous rulings of the European Court of Justice.

The ruling is not the first time a nation has embarrassed itself through an unsubtle appreciation of art at the customs office. Escorting a shipment of art to the United States in 1926, Marcel Duchamp was alerted by U.S. customs officials that Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space" — the seminal abstract tapered bronze sculpture — was not an artwork but rather fell under the classification of "Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies" and was subject to that category's higher tariff. The photographer and art dealer Edward Steichen, who owned the work, brought the case to court.

The famous legal drama — in which Steichen's attorney fees were paid by Peggy Guggenheim — ended in November 1928 when a judge ruled that " while some difficulty might be encountered in associating it [the sculpture] with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental, and as we hold under the evidence that it is the original production of a professional sculptor and is in fact a piece of sculpture and a work of art according to the authorities above referred to, we sustain the protest and find that it is entitled to free entry."