The recent art world controversies – the Sotheby’s/Christie’s price fixing; the Getty’s antiquity smuggling; Skin Fruit, the Jeff Koons/Dakis Joannou show at the New Museum; Jeffrey Deitch’s appointment as the Director of MOCA – all provoke vitriol over the same basic questions: How democratically should art be presented? What are the appropriate credentials for cultural gatekeepers? What should be delegated to museums and what to private institutions, and how? These dilemmas organize Don Argott’s documentary, The Art of the Steal, about the much-lauded Barnes Foundation, a jewelry box of masterpieces, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and African alike. Housed in Merion, Pennsylvania, a tony suburb of Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation was endorsed by Matisse as the only worthwhile place to view art in America. Situated in a sprawling garden, the Foundation is protected from not only metropolitan crowds, but even the peering curiosity of next-door neighbors. Conceived by Albert C. Barnes and founded in 1922 as a sort of utopia, in which cultural gems from across time and continent could be hung on equal planes, it is insulated from government bureaucracy and agenda. Mr. Barnes stipulated in his will that the Foundation remain a free-standing, educational institution, that his collection never be loaned, sold, moved, or rearranged.

But, as always, the literal etymology of “utopia” trumps the term’s concept, and the Barnes Foundation, after the death of its founder, indeed proves to be a “no place,” its future in the hands of exactly those Philadelphia elite who, despite his self-made fortune, Barnes never identified with. Mr. Barnes’s personal biography – born poor, boxed to pay for his UPenn tuition, made his millions with a patent for a venereal disease medication – surely informed his New Deal liberal politics. He amassed his collection over decades, often purchasing work by artists early in their careers before museums would be even remotely interested. Thus, the Foundation holds the world’s premier collection of Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, and Manet, with an estimated worth of somewhere between twenty and forty billion dollars. But the Barnes Foundation’s value is undeniably greater than the sum of its parts, “priceless,” according to everyone interviewed for the film, “ a handmade thing in a machine world.”

Much of The Art of the Steal documents the legal proceeding concerning the fate of the Foundation, with former teachers and students representing a grassroots-like determination to prevent the local government of Philadelphia from moving the collection to the city proper, where it the number of visitors could be drastically increased. The relocation, it goes without saying, would bring in tourist revenue to Philadelphia, a city known more for its stodgy historicism than for its cultural significance. Relocating the Barnes Foundation from Merion, according to the film’s ethos, would not only corrupt the original intent of Mr. Barnes, but also transform Philadelphia into a Disneyland of art. One wonders if the same objections would be made if the Foundation were located outside of New York City, in Westchester, say, and that Manhattan, a cultural city, was the target of the relocation.

Along with the dubious art direction (chapter titles in a steampunk font on torn scraps of paper; strangely literal b-roll footage) so common to documentaries, the film suffers from an excess of exposition, though this is perhaps necessary in tracing the complicated and odious iterations of bureaucracy and red tape. There are many tedious, family tree-style illustrations of who has control of what at what time and a disproportionate quantity of literal paperwork footage – sentences illuminated, words underlined, paragraphs highlighted. The film’s contemporary narratives are numerous and diverse: civil rights suits, legal hearings, corporations changing their status to “non-profit” and vice versa. The film makes clear that art, always a complex manifestation of economic value, allows a noble conceit for people whose real interest is in power and politics. Art is an opportunity for pretending that its’ not just all about the money which, 99% of the time, it is.

The Art of the Steal, it is disclosed in the credits, is financed by Lenny Feinberg, who as a former student of the Barnes Foundation, has personal reasons for endorsing the film’s blatant – just read the title – bias. The partisanship surely lends the film urgency, but it also prevents a fair discussion of the political rubric, which here seems particularly hypocritical. Mr. Barnes purchased his art according to his own set of aesthetic sensibilities, which were undeniably passionate. But one also walks away with the nagging suspicion that his connoisseurship was inflected with healthy doses of greed and revenge – he bought this art so that his enemies could not. Indeed, ostentation and competition have always constituted much of the purchasing logic of major collectors – just attend the contemporary art auctions in May to see hedge fund managers dueling it out with Russian oligarchs. It can’t really be all about the art.

But the film conflates virtue and taste, arguing against the relocation of the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia proper. The wish to keep the art where it is – hard to reach by public transportation and only open to a limited amount of visitors per day – is rendered noble, but not for the single, sound reason that it could be. Indirectly, perhaps even unconsciously, Argott builds a defense of curatorial decision-making, an argument that certain works, when displayed in proximity, under certain architectural conditions, send a political, if not a moral, message. Those in favor for keeping the Barnes Foundation in its original Merion location certainly understand this, but it is not the philosophical basis for their stance. Rather than a positive platform – these masterpieces, when viewed alongside the African and other non-Western art to which they are indebted, should remain in an intimate place of learning – they take a negative perspective – to move the collection to Philadelphia would be a corporate, opportunistic decision; that people not academically interested in art perhaps don’t deserve it.

It is history that gives the controversy its substance, retrospect that perceives the Barnes Foundation as a representation of a distinct era in art history worth preserving. We’ll have to wait and see if the Brant Foundation, in Greenwich, for instance, will befall the same debates in a hundred years. Will the highly commercial conceptual art of the past twenty years seem as distinctive of a particular moment? Will it be pressing that that works of John Currin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Donald Baechler, Jeff Koons, and Francesco Clemente not be moved to Manhattan, that they remain in Connecticut forever?

Art, Theft, History: The Art of the Steal

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