"The Art of the Steal" is a documentary posing as a heist movie - the heist being our city fathers' confiscation of Albert Barnes' priceless art.
The movie sides with a coalition of Barnes' friends, students and art lovers who've actively opposed efforts to uproot his suburban collection and convert it into a downtown tourist site and cash machine.
Will this rebel alliance succeed, the movie asks, or "will a man's will be broken and one of America's greatest cultural monuments be destroyed?"
Boy, if the SAT were that easy, I'd have gone to Harvard.
Will broken, monument destroyed.
Here in Philadelphia, we know that. That big hole where the Youth Studies Center once sat will be filled, in a year or so, by a $30 million gallery, and Barnes' collection will be moved from the "jewel box" in Lower Merion where he intended it to remain in perpetuity, away from the prying hands of the very Philadelphia plutocrats and pols who eventually grabbed it anyway.
How they undid his adamant legal wishes and shortchanged his legal heir (Lincoln University) gets recounted in "Steal" in a way that's lively, if one-sided - one-sided because most of the movie's designated heavies refused to talk with director Don Argott ("Rock School").
"Steal" starts with a brief history of Barnes and how he made his pile (argyrol, an antiseptic), schooled himself in modern art, accumulated an astounding collection of master works and blew his stack when he exhibited his (then) avant-garde paintings and the medieval local art and culture scene made fun of it.
Albert took his ball and went home, to Latch's Lane, built a unique shrine to the works, and then had several decades of sport showing the collection to commoners and students while telling art-world big shots to get lost. Barnes, who had a particular dislike for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, died in 1951.
From there, we revisit the gradual dismantling of Barnes' will - we see how strict adherence to his wishes erodes as various Barnes foundation officials and trustees come and go.
The coup de grace, "Steal" claims, is administered by a coalition of city and state politicians and billion-dollar-foundation muscle, a shadowy group able to game the system because it controls it (for example, somebody engineered a $100 million budget appropriation for the new Barnes' site a full year before a judge ruled on the move).
