The epic legal struggle that finally resulted in the breaking of philanthropist Albert Barnes' trust indenture of his beloved art collection and the subsequent move of the collection from a Philadelphia suburb into downtown Philly was chronicled in the documentary, The Art of the Steal. As a successful effort to turn an excruciating probate problem into entertainment, it is probably second only to dramatizations of Bleak House. This 2010 post from the Probate Lawyer Blog describes the controversy.
So what do the critics have to say about the success of the move? At least one critic, Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes, is not impressed:
Once the keepers of the Barnes found a way to pry the art away from its founder’s John Dewey-influenced vision of art-plus-installation-plus gardens-plus-education-program, a unified field, they should have devoted themselves to a smart, respectful, thoughtful and new presentation of great art, a place in which the art was The Thing. Instead, they have placed the emphasis not on the art, but on a Thomas Kinkadeian reminder of how it used to be-ish. Think of the team that brought you the new Barnes as the Administrators of Light. [Renoir, Nude from the Back, 1917. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]
The new Barnes is part of an accelerating trend: Over the last generation, governments, private funders, philanthropies and administrators have increasingly pushed art and art collections out of contexts in which access to aesthetics, history and cultural knowledge are primary and into ‘civic service’ as rainmakers for tourism or development. There has been little concurrent examination — least of all in Philadelphia — of how or if art should be made most accessible. Instead the question has been how to use art to serve other goals. That’s how we got the new Barnes. That’s how we got the $25 art museum admission fee. That’s how we got art museums renting their art to Las Vegas casinos. And that’s how great art is becoming a hobby for the leisure class, something available to an increasingly narrower socioeconomic band of Americans, an enterprise in which dollars matter more than ideas, engagement or discourse. The biggest success of the new Barnes is that it draws those lines more starkly than any other museum in America.
Art: Matisse, Seated Riffian, 1912, Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania.
