The Art of the Steal (2009)

Film: The Art of the Steal (2009)

Director: Don Argott

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

If you stick around here long enough, you'll know that there are some odd rules on the Oscar Viewing Project, my obsessive project where I try and view as many Oscar-nominated films as I possibly can during this lifetime.  One of the nuances is that I don't watch all of the categories, and specifically skip the shorts categories and the documentaries.  I think it's obvious why I don't do the Shorts (they're hard to find even two years after they came out-they'd border on the impossible if I went back a couple of decades-feature films struggle that far in the past.  However, documentaries aren't that much harder to track down than foreign-language films, and I definitely include those movies in the project.  No, the reason I don't do documentaries is that while it's possible (though not always easy) to be objective about a film that was considered great in its era but has aged poorly (in terms of technology or its stance on social issues), documentaries do not have that same luxury.  What was important even a decade ago might not seem so now, and certainly the way we approach facts, institutions, and the public good has changed.  There are few better illustrations of this than The Art of the Steal, a ten-year-old documentary that I randomly (I would be willing to bet that this film has been slowly-but-steadily moving itself to the top of my Netflix queue for 11 years, and I don't think that's an exaggeration from someone who usually keeps about 900 films on that list) caught yesterday.

(Real life doesn't have spoilers, but this is definitely intended to be a "big reveal" documentary, so proceed with caution) The movie is about the Barnes Foundation, a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art valued at some $25 billion.  Pretty much every artist you can think of from the late 19th and early 20th century is represented-van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Modigliani.  Another of the artists, Henri Matisse, apparently said of the collection and the school that once housed it, "it is the only sane place in America to view art."  Suffice it to say, it is a thing of value, and as the film says, the owner of the collection, Albert Barnes, had a very specific way he wanted the art to be appreciated and viewed.  After his death, though, there were consistent leadership changes within his foundation, many of which violated the spirit and letter of his will, which stipulated where he wanted the art to be presented.  The film ends with (according to the directors) an enormous amount of political maneuvering to move the collection from Lincoln University, where Barnes bequeathed it, to Philadelphia, to be a part of the larger Philadelphia Museum of Art, and indeed that is where it now lives, absent from a traditional university setting, but certainly viewed by considerably more people than it would have been in either Barnes' lifetime or in the original settings he stipulated in his will.

In my opinion, director Don Argott (despite his protestations), presents a one-sided argument in his movie.  There is little effort into understanding anyone who would have been supportive of moving the art from its original location in Lincoln University to Philadelphia.  How Argott could assume that it's not one-sided is absurd, and he doesn't make, in my opinion, enough of an effort to present both sides of this discussion.  Some of the figures involved in moving the collection to Philadelphia declined the interview (figures like billionaire art collector Ronald Perelman and Pew Charitable Trusts CEO Rebecca Rimel), but not all of them.  He has as part of his film former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, whom he heavily implies might have used state funds prior to a decision to move the art collection, of doing so without telling a court that there was $100 million in the state budget that could be used to keep the collection at Lincoln University (which needed the money to make repairs and modernize the museum); he certainly lists Rendell as one of several suspects who might have known about the money in the state budget.  But he doesn't ask Rendell about this, which makes me wonder about partiality in general in the documentary.  And once trust in the documentarians goes, it's hard to take what you've seen prior seriously.  Not all of the flashy editing, great twist reveals, and salacious name-dropping in the world makes up for a movie you don't think is being honest.

But there's also a more intriguing argument here.  Without abandon throughout the film, people loyal to Barnes' vision fight for the man's ability to dictate what happened to his art from beyond the grave, but no one ever asks-why should we care?  These paintings are not Barnes' creation-they are the creation of people like Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.  Why is it that Barnes gets to dictate for all-time how these paintings, which he once owned, get to be displayed?  It feels absurd to me that these get to remain his property for all time, even though he's been dead for 70 years.  You can argue that his method was correct, but arguing that "it was his his vision" is a bad argument-he's been dead far longer than he ever owned any of this art.  Putting aside the moral issue of whether or not there were falsehoods presented to a court (which, it's worth noting, that same judge eventually argued still didn't change his decision that the art could move to Philadelphia), Barnes should not get to dictate what happens to another person's artistic property for the rest of time just because he happened to die while he was still owning the art.  

It's hard to imagine an unbiased documentary today not at least discussing this perspective.  Views on inheritance and accumulated wealth have shifted pretty dramatically in the past decade (look at the passion behind Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign for clear evidence of this), and it's worth asking-why should Barnes' vision for this property continue to be dictated decades later?  One could put up a better argument that these paintings do more good as part of the public trust rather than continuing to be tethered to their previous owner; that his dominion over them should have ended when he died, and absent a spouse or a dependent who relied on Barnes for financial support, would be better off going to a public museum overrun by a government (which is instilled by a majority of the people).  The documentary spends so much time deifying Albert Barnes, that, even if they view him as a genius and innovator, it doesn't have time to question at what point does his dictate over art he didn't even create end?