Rich man, beggar man— and Albert Barnes

Albert Barnes, as is well known, did not suffer fools gladly. Among these, he numbered first and foremost the rich.

That may slightly surprise those for whom the possession of wealth is prima facie evidence of intellectual, not to say moral superiority, even though the present wreckage of the economy offers abundant proofs to the contrary.

Barnes wasn't averse to money as such, of course. He was a very rich man himself. But he hated the rich as a class. He wouldn't let a rich man through the doors of his gallery in Merion, and so far was he from clubbing with the rich that, with an eye to the future, he stipulated in the Barnes Foundation's indenture of trust that no party or social function ever take place on its grounds. (Barnes knew how much the rich love parties.)

Barnes's antipathy to the rich has often been taken as a form of inverse snobbery. But he had good grounds for wanting to keep them away from his collection. The rich, no matter what their tastes, have difficulty seeing a person or thing without registering its commodity value.

This autonomic reflex is nowhere more apparent than in regard to fine art. The value of an art object is, for the rich, inseparable from the price it will fetch on the art market, whose principal purpose is to assign works of art their place in the hierarchy of conspicuous consumption. Art's function, that is, is to be owned; and the more it has cost, the greater its value.

Art without dollar signs

True, the rich owner may love his Degas or Matisse for its beauty as well. But his aesthetic perception is swaddled in his monetary one. He cannot help see the dollar sign it wears. He remembers what he paid for it, and he swells with pride to think how it has appreciated.

Barnes's great idea was to reserve his collection for those he defined as "the plain people . . . men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories, schools, stores and similar places." These were the people who, because they couldn't dream of owning fine art, possessed the "plainness" of vision to actually see it on its aesthetic merits alone.

Of course, that vision was likely to be untutored and was almost certainly unsophisticated— as that of Barnes, himself born in poverty, had once been. Barnes's solution was a unique form of art education, using not slides or photographs of art but direct exposure to it, and not as isolated objects but in ensembles designed to create aesthetic and pedagogical wholes.

Bragging rights

Barnes did not want to create a museum— the sort of place where the public consumer of art he doesn't own (as opposed to the private owner) momentarily appropriates an experience that gives him bragging rights: "I saw the Picasso show." For such an experience to constitute a bragging right, however, it must be time-sensitive— that is, commoditized.

A great painting may hang on a museum wall for decades without attracting the attention of anyone but its conservators; at most, it may draw the casual glance of the visitor on his way to stand in line for the specially priced blockbuster exhibit. The very availability of the museum's permanent collections reduces their value; they can be seen any time and so need never be seen at all.

What is rare and difficult of access—the limited-time exhibit for which one stands in line, pays exorbitantly and cranes one's neck to see above those competing with one for time and space—is perceived as valuable because it's exclusive.

The moment when I get to see the Picasso from the best (i.e., most competitive) angle, excluding other viewers or forcing them to look from relatively disadvantaged positions, is the moment of consumption—a form of temporary ownership in which the artwork "belongs" to me because I'm literally blocking others' access to it. Of course, I must yield my place to the next temporary owner or else suffer sharp elbows or the equivalent of the constable's nightstick: The museum guard will remind me that I am not an owner but, past my 15 seconds of license, a loiterer.

Democratic experiment

Such an experience is the very opposite of what we call appreciation: the patient, disciplined study of a work that yields its intrinsic value and significance only to focused attention over a long period of time.

Barnes tried to arrange such viewing through his Foundation classes, and to teach the capacity for it. He thought it could be the basis of democratic citizenship itself— or at least, as he put it himself, an "experiment" in it.

This is why the new "Barnes Museum"— the very name contradicts itself— negates Barnes's vision. And the controversy over removing food service to the hungry from its Parkway vicinity is consistent with this travesty. Albert Barnes didn't locate his Foundation beside a soup kitchen, but the man who admitted janitors to his collection in preference to millionaires would, no doubt, regard it as the final dishonor to have the needy turned away in his name.

Consuming Picasso

Ironically, the Barnes Collection itself contains one of the great images of human hunger in world art: Picasso's The Ascetic. The happy hordes whom the new museum hopes to attract will be able to peruse it at their well-fed leisure, secure in the knowledge that actual hunger won't disturb their own acts of consumption.

You cannot destroy something great and noble without dwarfing yourself. Mayor Nutter has grotesquely contorted himself in an attempt to deny the obvious: that the new swells on the Parkway won't tolerate the riff-raff approaching anywhere near their palace of art.

Welcome to the City of Brotherly Love, where, outside the only great art collection ever expressly dedicated to the common man, even the sidewalks are too good for the poor.