Good deeds aren’t always the result of ethical actions

People can commit crimes for the best of reasons. It all depends on your perspective.

For example, how do you define “crime”? Or, for that matter, how do you define “best of reasons”? The documentary “The Art of the Steal,” which plays for one more day at the Magic Lantern , explores those questions as they apply to one of the most valued art collections in the world.

The film tells the story of the Barnes Foundation , a privately owned collection of Post-Impressionist and early-Modern art situated just outside Philadelphia, and how it was appropriated - now there’s a neutral term, some would say stolen - by the Philadelphia Museum of Art .

Seems the collection was amassed by a Philadelphia-born physician, Dr. Albert Barnes, in the second decade of the past century. To house his collection, which included dozens of works by Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and others, he established a school in Merion, Pa., barely five miles from downtown Philadelphia. Being born out of humble origins, Barnes was no fan of that city’s gentry, So he did everything to alienate the powers that were, including the owner of the city’s newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Walter Annenberg .

He also was determined to keep his collection out of their hands. So he drew up a will that stipulated his collection would never be sold, loaned or moved from its Merion estate.

So what is the movie about? It’s about how the whole collection came under the control of organizations, including the Pew Charitable Trust , that decided to move the whole thing to Philadelphia. To the very museum that its founder, Dr. Barnes, hated.

Irony, eh? The film, which was directed by Don Argott , makes somewhat of a case that Barnes wasn’t the most likeable or easiest guy to work with. And, ultimately, the art may end up in a better place - by moving in 2012 to Philadelphia.

But it also stresses that the folks who forced the move, many of whom were movers and shakers in Pennsylvania politics, were less interested in art than in this particular art collection, which is worth an estimated $25 billion - billion! And they were interested because of what the collection could do for them.

Which brings us back to my beginning paragraph. These people can say that they were acting in the best interests of both the collection and of the art patrons who long to see it. But not only did they act in defiance of Barnes’ wishes as outlined specifically in his will, but they all - in one way or another - stood to gain personally from the move.

But then that is the history of America, if not the world. People doing what they want, for their own self-interest, and hiding behind an excuse of working for the public good.

In the film, no less a person than Julian Bond calls these people “vandals.” And he, based by the evidence presented by “The Art of the Steal,” has a great point.

Below : The trailer for “The Art of the Steal.”