Sam! Have you seen the documentary series about the Gardner Museum heist on Netflix? What did you think?? (Apologies if you've discussed it before, I was on tumblr while watching and remembered you had an interest in art heists!)
I haven’t, though I’ve heard a great deal about it (my parents watched it). I have a hard time with documentaries about the Gardner these days because I know enough about it to have strong opinions, and also to catch when someone is eliding a fact or getting it wrong. While the heist is fascinating, and its allure for people who tend to become obsessed with it is equally as fascinating, there’s often a lot of context surrounding it that either isn’t paid attention to or is brushed off in the course of telling the best possible story. It’s one of those issues where being so passionate about something is a downside because you can’t actually enjoy media about the thing, I’m afraid.
I’d almost rather have a documentary specifically about why people become so obsessed with it -- less about whodunit, and more about why it seems to suck people in and make it their lives’ work. Even the Mona Lisa, when it was stolen and generated a huge amount of publicity in the early 20th century, didn’t cause the intimate, personal level of fascination that the Gardner often causes. I think it would be really interesting to see a meditation on why that might be.
