The Art of the Steal, directed by Don Argott, 2009
Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas, 2008
Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery, directed by Arne Birkenstock, 2014
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2015

I took a train during a pandemic to see a painting. Not a specific painting, just any painting. The forecast had said there was a slight chance of light rain, but when I arrived in Philadelphia, it was pouring, and I was wearing inadequate shoes. I walked the twenty minutes from the train station to the Barnes Foundation and arrived cold and dripping, my shoes making squish squish sounds as I crossed their nice floors.

Travel tip: The Barnes Foundation basement bathrooms have a full setup in each stall: toilet, sink, power hand dryer. If you need to, you can take off your soggy shoes, hold them under the dryer meant for your hands, and blast them and you with hot air until you are suitable for public presentation again.

We have paintings in Baltimore, but lately the museum curators have been selecting work that turns the art viewing experience into something like a cross between being scolded by a teacher and being asked to sign a petition outside of a Whole Foods. They had a video installation by Candice Breitz at the BMA that felt like sitting through the world’s longest PSA, the kind that comes on Hulu because you're too poor to afford the subscription service without ads, in between a thirty-second spot for a prescription for colitis and a paradoxical ice cream commercial that says it is okay to be fat and this ice cream will not make you fat. Except that this PSA is an hour long and you are told over and over again that sex work is work, I get it, can we please get back to the show about the AI that tries to murder people now. “I get it” will forever be the least desired response to being confronted by a work of art; it means the work is dead inside.

I first heard of the Barnes Foundation through the 2009 documentary The Art of the Steal, which documented the “theft” of the collection of early 20th century art of chemist Albert Barnes by the Philadelphia nonprofit community and city government. Barnes had preferred the art to stay in Merion, Pennsylvania, a small town not far from the city. He had had a building constructed to his exact specifications and arranged the art by his exacting standards. The Foundation was not open to the public, it was used primarily for education (and while this is said over and over again, no one says what exactly these classes are all about or why they were particularly special) and you could arrange a visit by asking for an appointment, although Barnes apparently frequently turned down requests.

But now the art has been moved to the Museum District of Philadelphia, where hundreds of thousands of people come to have their picture taken with the Rocky statue or see the dinosaur bones at the natural history museum or read inaccurate explanations of centrifugal force at the Franklin Institute. These are exactly the people Barnes did not seem to want near his art collection. You know, the rabble. The hordes. The middle class tourists in cargo shorts. After Barnes died, and various outside forces wrangled some control over the collection and the building in which it was displayed, changing it from by appointment only to having set hours where it is open to all, Violetta de Mazia, Barnes's successor, reportedly complained to one of the teachers, “They're letting the public in.” She was in tears.

And look, I've grumbled plenty about all the same things every other aesthete does. People talking on their phones, people with big smiles selfie-ing in front of Picasso’s Guernica, people glancing at a Rembrandt and shrugging, a Midwestern man staring skeptically at a Rothko and declaring “my 4-year-old could paint that.” There is no place for quiet contemplation or sketching now that just anyone can get in. It's hard to reach an ecstatic state in front of a Michelangelo when you're being jostled by Russian teens. The drive toward accessibility for all art forms — every song ever written available for instant streaming, every painting ever painted available online in a degraded digital quality — has created a casual and, dare I say it, disrespectful relationship to art. But attempts to control access, either by making institutions physically inaccessible or intimidating or charging $25 in admission, simply reminds me of how often I have been the type of person I’m assuming de Mazia wanted to keep out. I was nineteen the first time I stepped inside an art museum, as I came from a family that believed art was a waste of time, and the feeling of this place is not for you — me being rural, broke, Midwestern, uneducated, and with a bit of a chip on my shoulder — still pervades.

Visiting the relocated Barnes, ten years after learning about it and wanting to see this monumental collection of art, I was standing in front of what is clearly a very important Cézanne, and I was amused. Before, I had regretted not seeing the Barnes in its original location, and now I couldn’t help but be relieved I had not suffered the particular disappointment of making that pilgrimage. Imagine going through all the trouble of writing to the Foundation to request entrance, gaining acceptance after proving your worthiness, arranging travel to suburban Pennsylvania from Paris or rural Kansas, all of that anticipation and build up, then you get here and you are surrounded by a thousand Renoirs. All those creepy, creamy children. All that fruit. All of those blurry bonnets. I get that this here is a really good Cézanne, but it is still a Cézanne, it is still a bunch of oranges. The Barnes, for all of its tasteful arrangements and crowing over the billions of dollars of art contained within, is still basically the same five guys who crowd out every other art museum in America and Europe. At least I only had to take an hour-long train next to a guy who wouldn’t pull his mask over his nose and walk a mile through the rain for this.

I found myself wandering around in the corners, looking for something unexpected. There were a couple of delights. There were some strange Charles Demuth watercolors, full of genderfucking and circus imagery. I was surprised they were by the same guy who did so many boring paintings of buildings and that one of the number five that is at the Met. They were weird, although they made me long for George Grosz to show up somewhere. Something with stakes, you know? There were some good tapestries, a nice Miklos, it was all very tasteful in the way the not very good sandwich I had at the cafe was tasteful. The ghost of Barnes is probably pleased that the pandemic has restrained the crowds somewhat, as a limited number of people were let in at a time. I only heard one shrieking child and one pedestrian conversation by middle-aged women that he would have objected to. (“Did you know van Gogh lost his mind?” “Well, you can kind of see it in the art, can't you?”)

Beyond my profound “Is that all there is.... to 20th century art” feelings, in the same way that a Demuth next to a Soutine lights each one of them up, one of the combinations I liked so much I felt compelled to take a picture on my phone, the juxtaposition of the Barnes next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art makes the latter seem a bit more sterile and flaccid. All of that white space, all of that singularity. Here at the Barnes is another way to be around art. The interest lies all in the arrangement, which seems like such a fussy feminine thing to do, to decorate, to arrange. But it felt so much more lived in, around, and through, than a big painting on a big white wall, presented for us to ponder.

There's a scene near the end of the movie Summer Hours, I thought of it as I walked through the Barnes. The matriarch of the family is dying, and she wants to handle the estate. Her uncle was a painter of some importance, so they have all of these things. They have his notebooks and his sketches. They have the work of some of his friends, tea sets, and vases. They have the pieces they picked up over the years, a Louis Majorelle desk, a Hoffmann armoire. There are pieces of a Degas plaster – the children knocked it over years ago, and its shattered form is kept in a plastic grocery bag with vague hopes that maybe it can be restored. The Redon is rotting from the humidity, the armoire is filled with plastic children's toys.

Once the artworks are turned over to the state — after various forms of pressuring, including the withholding of an export license in order to prevent an international sale and the threat of hefty taxation of the estate — the collection is broken apart, cataloged, and placed in a museum setting. Some of it is on display, others are hidden away in the bowels of the institution, possibly never to be seen again. Frédéric sees the desk where his mother, now passed, did her business, shoved unopened mail, searched for a pen, locked away in a glass case. “Doesn't it seem caged?”

He uses the word disenchanted to describe the sight of a vase in a glass case of a museum rather than filled with flowers, placed on a table that also has half empty bottles of wine, a dirty ashtray, plates dirty with crumbs of what used to be a plum cake. It is exactly the right word. But who lives among art like that these days, now that we are hyper aware of the price tag on everything? Can one be casual about a work of art in the way the family of Summer Hours is, now that art is bought with an expectation toward reselling it? The Chicago collector who gives a tour of his consumable goods in The Price of Everything has disenchanted the works himself, they are all displayed as if his apartment were a shop. There is no risk of a sculpture being toppled over by a child, nor of cigarette smoke darkening an oil painting. He will later hand over these items to the Art Institute as a donation, with the stipulation that the works must be on display as arranged by him for years to come, not placed in storage or sent out. His collection is mostly the same five contemporary guys you see everywhere else in America.

Mr. and Mrs. Ommeslaghe give a similar tour of the artworks in the documentary Beltracchi: The Art of the Forgery. Their collection is mostly the same guys you see everywhere else in America. There's a Warhol, there's a cursed Renoir. There's a Matisse, and Mrs. Ommeslaghe is self-conscious about the “Japanese objects” she has arranged near the Matisse. The husband seems to disapprove, but I think it works. One work is missing, however: a Campendonk that was revealed to be a fraud, painted instead by the German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. She speaks for a moment, quite movingly, about her affection for the painting. It was of a cow, and it summoned from within her, whenever she looked at it, memories of growing up in the countryside, of her family, of her home. Revealed as a fake, though, it must be banished. It's sent back to the gallery, and they are issued a refund. Had they kept it, they say, it would have been hidden from guests, as it had been transformed — no longer art, it is merely a “decorative object.”

There are many, many movies about how to be an artist. There's the Pollock biopic; there is Kirk Douglas as van Gogh, there is Willem Defoe as van Gogh; there are humorless documentaries about Eva Hesse, Marina Abramović, Vivian Maier; there is Big Eyes, there is Camille Claudel 1915, there is Frida. Everyone stares pensively at a blank space, everyone moves with a fury once inspiration takes over. There are many movies about how to collect art. There's The Price of Everything, there is Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, wherein no one seems to think it particularly immoral the way she was able to amass an enormous collection of great artists while a war was going on, buying work dirt cheap from desperate collectors and artists who did not have her access to exit visas and family wealth and were less capable of getting the hell out of Europe with a fortune-creating art collection. How to collect art? Find eager prey.

There is almost nothing, though, about how to live around and within art, except through this method of creating a sense of authenticity for yourself via access to artistic works via the stockpiling of wealth. Barnes did it, the Ommeslaughes did it, all of the collectors from Price did it. What is the line between collecting and hoarding, what is the difference between valuing something for its worth and valuing something for its price? It’s funny that we have so little to fill in those gaps for us. I guess there is that Geoffrey Rush film The Best Offer, but his desire to sit in a room by himself with all of these portraits is used to show that he is slightly deranged. Art is not for reflection or for keeping company, these documentaries suggest, it is a commodity. It is for the auction house, or the thieves, they understand its true value. It is made to stay in motion, to trade hands again and again until it finds its grave in the museum. But of course these documentaries are made to reflect reality, and for many, this is the reality of art, buying with an eye to sell, or with an eye to forcing a prestigious art museum to name a room after you.

There are multiple satires about how inadequate and unnatural this is, from Velvet Buzzsaw to The Square. But they stop short of the true grotesqueries of the art market, misunderstand the various hierarchies, and think pointing out that people in art care more about paint than humanity is some big gotcha. The biggest idea they have to offer is creation liberated from commerce, they shy away from the complexity of the thing-ness of art and the way sentiment mingles with money. A longing for purity — John Malkovich is the hero of Velvet Buzzsaw, creating works in the sand and cheering as the sea washes them away — is a wish to disengage, to avoid complication, to reveal a kind of intellectual emptiness.

Summer Hours is all there is, at least on the streaming services. It opens on a shot of the green loveliness of a not well-controlled garden. Adrienne, an artist too, although the type who now works in Japan and wears a lot of neoprene, in the course of the film sees an object from her childhood and tells her family of a dream she had about it. She dreams she took the object, a silver tea tray in the shape of a lily pad, outside, where it turned back into a leaf, into its original form of inspiration. In the dream, she says, she panicked. The created, manufactured world undoing itself. She was relieved to wake up. The film ends as it opened, with the camera moving through the greenery, as wind blows through the trees. //