Review of The Art of the Steal (2010) by Essa H — 03 Aug 2010

The Art of the Steal is built on the dubious premise that you will give a shit about the fate of an art collection. Director Don Argott's second miscalculation is to assume that if you really were for some reason passionate about the location of this art (a world-class collection, to be fair), you would side with the highbrow snobs who want less access to it by the public.

The first twenty minutes or so are interesting and entertaining enough, the footage of timeless art is gorgeous to drink in and the biography of its collector Alfred C. Barnes (an admirable misanthrope: he was a medial inventor from a working class background who became fabulously wealthy and was one of the few capitalists in the country at the time to employ blacks side-by-side with whites) is nicely retold.

By the time though that we've moved forty-five years beyond his death in 1951 and Argott and his team of pompous interviewees honestly expect us to be outraged by the fate of this collection I sighed so loud you very well may have heard me (Barnes wanted to leave his art as an indivisible set, unmoved and used for art education, not public exhibition).

Even good documentaries can get a little mundane, but The Art of the Steal audaciously presents the influx of the masses into a wealthy neighborhood near the Barnes collection as a scandal in and of itself (you know you're in trouble when bad traffic is supposed to be your most cogent argument).

This is a one-sided story that glibly glosses over some really fair questions about the whole case. Argott tries to make it seem like he's trying to make broader points about the commercialization of culture but really, his focus is solely on this over-dramatized saga that will only be interesting to a very narrow segment of society.

The Art of the Steal is cramped and shockingly elitist. Just imagine it: the hoi polloi with their grimy hands and small minds near such expensive splendor? The horror, the horror!