Home > Movies > The Art of the Steal

The Art of the Steal

Critics' Pick

(No longer in theaters)

Rating: No Rating
Director: Don Argott
Running Time: 101 minutes
Reader Rating: Write a Review

Rate & Review

Genre

Documentary

Producer

Sheena M. Joyce

Distributor

IFC Films

Release Date

Feb 26, 2010

Release Notes

Limited

Review

Calculated to enrage and pulling it off like gangbusters, Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal pits the legacy of the late Albert C. Barnes’s Barnes Foundation (which boasts arguably the world’s finest collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art) against the social-climbing, philistine, downright Nixonian machinations of Philadelphia’s wealthiestï¿½who gamed the system and pried the collection loose in defiance of Barnes’s legal will. (The film’s villains include the Pew Charitable Trusts, Walter Annenberg, foundation director Bernard C. Watson, and a slew of Philadelphian pols who regard the collection as a cash cow and tourist magnet.) Beyond the outrageous story of the Barnes, The Art of the Steal makes the depressing case that not-for-profit culture attracts a distinct species of greedhead and charlatan, the kind that likes to bask in the radiance in artists’ reflected glory. — David Edelstein