Directed by Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos • Documentary • 2017 • 80 minutes
In the style of Exit Through the Gift Shop, Stealing Rodin is a critical and humorous statement about Art and the market around it. The documentary traces the story of Luis Onfray’s artistic and criminal act. In 2005, the Palace of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile, hosted a collection by celebrated French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The morning after the exhibit’s opening, museum guards were dismayed to find that one of the Rodin pieces had gone missing. This shocking discovery sparked a frantic search involving the museum’s staff, and soon the Santiago police. Meanwhile, public curiosity was sparked and the desire to witness the empty pedestal on which the masterpiece should have been made the Rodin collection the most visited exhibition in the history of Chile.
Interviews with famous artists such as Guillermo Frommer and Adrián Valenzuela, lawyers, cops, and theorists help us relive this infamous and daring event, while art student Luis Onfray himself explains the personal and artistic reasons for pulling off Chile’s greatest art theft.
Up Next in Museums, Collectors and the Art Market
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25 Texans in the Land of Lincoln
Directed by Ellen Brodsky • Documentary • With Professor Teresa Van Hoy, Priscilla Reyes, Eric Villalpando • 2019 • 33 minutes
Twenty-five history students from St. Mary’s University take a 2,000 mile bus trip from the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas to Springfield, Illinois to build a Day of the De...
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Typeface
Directed by Justine Nagan • Documentary • With None listed on IMDB • 2009 • 63 minutes
In rural Wisconsin, a lone employee waits in a cavernous old museum for visitors to come. A few individuals straggle in every few days and then, come Friday, the museum fills with life. Machines hum, presses p...
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White Balls on Walls
Directed by Sarah Vos • Documentary • 2023 • 90 minutes
The slogan “Meet the Icons of Modern Art” needs to be scraped off the glass wall of the Stedelijk, Amsterdam’s Museum of Modern Art. Because precisely who these icons of modern art are is very much the question.
Who gets to decide? And who...
