"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
Review: The Art of the Steal
Swiping a dead guy's priceless art collection is grand theft and makes grand drama, but it's a rather minor outrage
♦ Let me introduce you to a dead guy, Dr Albert Barnes. He was an early 20th century millionaire and art collector, who bought works by Cézanne, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Renoir, and others before these artists were widely acclaimed and long before their works were traded at auctions with multi-million dollar price tags.
(Inside the Barnes Foundation)
Barnes was an eccentric character, and he was infuriated when a brief display of his collection in Philadelphia was greeted with unanimously negative reviews. He decided that the art establishment of that city would never have control off his collection.
He established a small art school a few miles outside of Philadelphia, where the art was hung for students and a very few visitors. He left a will he thought was ironclad, specifying that the art could never be moved to Philadelphia or anywhere else, and could never even be loaned out to other museums. And then he died, in 1951.
Over the next fifty years his collection of art remained at the Barnes Foundation, a small school and gallery in the tiny town of Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. But in decades of art inflation, his little-seen art collection has come to be worth literally billions of dollars, and so it's been stolen.
A central philosophical question that the movie doesn't ask is, who gives a rip about Doc Barnes' will?
He was fabulously wealthy, so he controlled this art while he was alive.
But he ain't alive any more.
If his will specified that nobody could see the art, ever, I wonder, would the moviemakers still see violating the dead guy's intent as an outrage?
The thieves are the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lenfest Foundation, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which will run the new Barnes Museum on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philly. For a substantial admission price many millions of tourists will see the Barnes collection in a new museum that's already under construction and is expected to open in 2012, in the city Barnes despised, where his will stated that the art could never again be shown.
All this I leaned from the new documentary The Art of the Steal, which was funded by opponents of the move and which leaves no doubt about that. Opponents dominate screen time and the moviemakers make it clear that the Pew and the big money elite of Philadelphia are the bad guys here.
I'm totally convinced that they're bad guys, but not totally convinced that it's an outrage that people will finally see this art. I'll wholeheartedly recommend the movie, though. It's a very well-made film about the way America really works. It tells the story of American politics and commerce — money trumps art, money trumps rights, money trumps law, money trumps everything, and money never loses. You'll be angered, as I was. It's the best documentary I've seen in years, and it documents an injustice.
But that said, it's a fairly minor injustice. The victim is a guy whose been dead for almost sixty years, and whose will has obviously and illegally been violated. Subsidiary victims are a handful of art enthusiasts whose feelings have been hurt and whose artistic sensibilities have been offended. Unlike the average outrages that we're usually worked up about, nobody's been jailed or killed, poisoned or deported, shock-and-awed or Guantanamoed. In that sense The Art of the Steal is almost an abstract work.
A central philosophical question that the movie doesn't ask is, who gives a rip about Doc Barnes' will? He was fabulously wealthy, so he controlled this art while he was alive. But he ain't alive any more. If his will specified that nobody could see the art, ever, I wonder, would the moviemakers still see violating the dead guy's intent as an outrage?
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