The foundation's art collection is a unique and amazing cultural artifact that posterity owes to the irascible passion of Albert C. Barnes. It's an art experience like no other, one that forces visitors to look at paintings in unconventional ways, but most of all to look at them closely for what they are. One never tires of the Barnes, because every visit renews the initial epiphany. Conventional art history goes out the window there, with paintings representing many styles and philosophies mixed together - not randomly as they appear, but according to a scheme that the founder devised. With art museums everywhere becoming more market-driven, we can't afford to lose this refreshingly naive experience of seeing pictures presented almost naked.
Few museums offer such an unmodulated experience of art.
If that is lost, then the Barnes won't be saved. It will only be transformed into something inferior. When people talk, as they have been recently, about moving the collection to Center City, they're talking about creating a tourist museum that can attract and accommodate big crowds and earn more money, for both the foundation and the city. But bigness is the Barnes' mortal enemy. It was a lust for bigness that drove the foundation to the financial brink and forced executive director Kimberly Camp to wander among the philanthropists.