What a view | From Cai Guo-qiang’s fireworks to a Boston heist and more, art documentaries on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and BBC First

The theft of paintings by Degas, Vermeer, Rembrandt and others from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 is the focus of series on Netflix and BBC First

Explore the growing power of the Asian art market in Taiwanese director Hsu Hao-hsuan’s documentary My Dear Art, available on Amazon Prime

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The Billion Dollar Art Hunt on BBC First is one of many art documentaries available to watch. Photo: BBC First

Stephen McCarty

Published: 9:45am, 16 May 2021Updated: 9:45am, 16 May 2021

If a picture is worth a thousand words then that seriously short-changes the art world’s big names, including fireworks king Cai Guo-qiang, the man behind the thunderous 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony.

Despite blasting out of a Quanzhou backwater and establishing a global brand of explosive entertainment, Cai remained obsessed – at least up until the making of director Kevin Macdonald’s 2016 Netflix documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-qiang – with creating a towering, fiery Jacob’s Ladder reaching from Earth to the clouds. After three aborted attempts, beginning in 1994, will the (literal) balloon finally go up?

Stealing paintings, meanwhile, has long been a handy means of making easy cash – at least for unscrupulous crime bosses, if not the thieves themselves. Four-part documentary This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist (Netflix), revisits the US city of Boston in Massachusetts of 1990 and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, from which US$500 million worth of works by Degas, Vermeer, Rembrandt and others were stolen.

Two men impersonating police officers were early suspects; hovering over them, however, was the dread hand of the mafia. And although this investigation edges tantalisingly towards identifying who took the 13 artworks – including a 12th century Chinese gu, a bronze vessel – it doesn’t provide definitive answers.

Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-qiang by Kevin Macdonald.

A scene from Abstract – The Art of Design. Photo: Netflix

But hold the bus! Following the same scent we have journalist John Wilson in (perhaps allowing for inflation?) The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC First). Wilson’s analysis supports theories suggesting the haul (or at least part of it) found its way to Ireland.

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