Barnes was no philistine. If only we could say the same of Philly.
By Jonathan Kiefer
Have you heard about that protracted, politically porky legal battle over moving a dead millionaire’s priceless, private early modern art collection from a wealthy Philadelphia suburb into a downtown tourist mecca?
Perhaps a better question: Do you care?
Well, it’s not just any dead millionaire—it’s
Albert C Barnes
, whose last will and testament specified his axe should be ground against the presumed philistinism of Philadelphia’s power elite in perpetuity. That hasn’t happened, and Barnes’ acolytes are pissed, so one of them hired
Don Argott
to make a lopsided leaflet of a documentary about it.
If only Argott had the courage of a little critical distance. What a field day he could have had with such ready-made characters as the aforementioned acolytes, the contentious lawyers, the priggish dewlapped art dealers and the slickly litigious political strivers.
That’s not to mention Barnes himself, a working-class Philly kid who paid his own way through University of Pennsylvania, made a fortune from inventing an antibiotic for gonorrhea, and retired young to found an art school and fill it up with piles of great paintings. Reception from the local cognoscenti to the collection was chilly enough—at least at first, before they figured out what modernism was worth—that Barnes would soon decry his native city as “a depressing intellectual slum.”
What’s really depressing in this movie is that it gets so many layers deep into the grasping vulgarity of nonprofit culture mongering. Additionally, its own abhorrence of those same nonprofits comes off so crassly as to all but cancel out any remaining opportunity for actual art appreciation. One justification for
The Art of the Steal
being a film and not a long-form magazine article is the chance to really look at all that great art, but no such luck; Argott’s too busy with the awkward problem of making a case against more people having more access to a trove of masterpieces. He can’t seem to see how his attempt to curry anti-establishment favor actually endorses elitism, and so his film is vain, unbalanced, illogical, overstated and, yes, damn compelling.
It should be pointed out—and of course it is pointed out—that no less an authority than
Henri Matisse
once described the Barnes Foundation as “the only sane place to see art in America.” A movie of this bent really couldn’t ask for a better sound bite than that, even if it is self-evident hyperbole. Of course, the same movie also puts forth an assertion that the dismantling of this aesthete-approved idyll could be “the greatest act of cultural vandalism since World War II”—a not-even-funny affectation that at least a few denizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Burma, China and many nations in Africa, for starters, might consider culturally atrocious in and of itself.
The Art of the Steal
Directed by Don Argott
The Screen
101 min.
NR
