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Reviews
The Art of the Steal (2009)
There are two sides to every story
As a Philadelphian, I've watched the controversies over the Barnes play out for almost two decades.
Like the small, but vocal group known as "Save the Barnes," the makers of this documentary consistently refuse to acklowdege certain facts and ask difficult question -- they pretend that there were no problems with the museum prior to several years ago. They paint the Barnes move in black-and-white terms, infused with conspiracy theories about Philadelphia's elite plotting for years to "steal" the Barnes' collection.
They never deal with the fact that the whole reason that the move was able to happen is because the museum was mismanaged into bankruptcy, and that few people have much sympathy for the move because the collection was so inaccessible.
Some facts that you're not going to get from the film:
1. The Barnes Foundation was mismanaged into bankruptcy. Lincoln University, who Alfred Barnes put in charge of managing his estate, had no clue how run a world class museum. They allowed the museum building to fall into serious disrepair and did not properly keep up the surround garden. Other mistakes include aspects of the mid-90s tour, which was done in order to raise money to pay for repairs to the building.
The Foundation was warned by art experts that some items in its collection were too fragile to be shipped around the world. Management didn't listen, and a Matisse mural was permanently damaged. By the end of the 1990s Lincoln University burned through the Foundation's endowment, leaving it on the brink of bankruptcy. And it was the fear of banktrupcy that was the impetuts for taking control away from Lincoln and moving the collection.
2. The Museum is inaccessible and management never made any attempt to make it more accessible. The Museum building is located off a side street in a residential neighborhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Public transportation does not run directly to it – the closet it gets is a bus stop a half a mile away. Parking is also extremely limited, partly the result of neighbors successfully petitioning the township that the Barnes resides in to limit the amount of on-street parking for cars and buses. Management never made an attempt to setup a private shuttle service or work with SEPTA (the Philadelphia metro area public transit authority) to create a bus that would pick people up at designated points in Philadelphia and take them to the front door of the Barnes. Nor was any attempt made to build a satellite parking lot a mile or so away and have a shuttle service. On top of these transportation issues, because the building that houses the collection is so small, the Barnes required visitors to purchase tickets for a reserved time well in advance.
3. The museum never received any support from the local government. The Montgomery County government only became interested in supporting the Barnes when it began to look like a reality that the collection was going to be moved over the county line into Philadelphia. As already noted, the local government sided with the neighborhoods over the Barnes on the parking issue.
What would have made a far more interesting documentary was examining the greater public interest in the Barnes' art collection being as accessible as possible vs breaking Barnes' will. You have to be delusional to believe that the Barnes collection is accessible. Its location and the small building the collection is in severely limits the number of people who can see the art. Most museums do everything they can to make their collections as accessible as possible. The Lourve, for instance, has such a large collection and not enough floor space that at any given time a good portion of its collection is in storage. This has prompted the museum to setup satelight museums outside of France so that the works in storage and be brought out and put on display. Moving the Barnes to downtown Philadelphia will no doubt allow more people – many more people – to see the collection. Anti-move people and this film are so dogmatic that they've taken the position that this a bad thing. They've become the elitists they claim to be railing against.