My Kid Could Paint That
I've just gotten back from a film festival tour with a documentary I directed, My Kid Could Paint That, about Marla Olmstead, an internationally acclaimed four-year-old painter. Marla's abstract paintings sold for as much as $25,000 a piece, but when her father was accused of secretly authoring the paintings, their value plummeted overnight.
In the Q&A sessions after screenings of the film, there was one question I was always asked, a question that invariably elicited a murmur of approval from audiences:
"Isn't it the same painting whether a four-year-old or a 40-year-old made it?"
It's an interesting question. If a collector spends thousands of dollars on, say, the typewriter with which Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, and it turns out later that this typewriter was never used by Kerouac, we would all agree that the collector has been conned -- even if the typewriter is precisely the same model Kerouac used. We understand that there isn't something inherently valuable in the object of the typewriter itself, but in the story of the typewriter. This seems intuitive to us -- but not so in the case of painting. With paintings, the general public expects the story to be contained on the canvas, and nowhere else.
This is also, perhaps, one of the reasons we're uncomfortable with non-representational painting -- it doesn't seem to tell a story. Picture frames look like windows, and it makes sense to peer through a window and see a landscape, or a figure. Why not just make a mountain look like a mountain, and a person look like a person? What story could a painting possibly be telling when inside the frame is only splattered paint?
I myself never really understood what was all the fuss about painters like Jackson Pollock. So when I first heard that a four-year-old's paintings were being compared to his, it sounded to me like strong evidence that the emperor wears no clothes. If a four-year-old can do it, can it truly be such an earth shattering achievement? As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman says in My Kid Could Paint That, "It's the ultimate joke: a chimp could do it, an elephant could do it. People just think you have to be crazy to pay that amount for what looks like something anybody could do." As our cameras rolled, media frenzy and feverish collectors drove Marla's prices from $250 dollars to $25,000 dollars. It seemed to me I was filming what was truly behind the perceived value of Jackson Pollock's paintings.
But a funny thing happened while I was trying to make a documentary skeptical of abstract art.
I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting. When I wasn't around, she completed remarkable canvases larger than herself, with sweeping paint splashes and elaborate flourishes. But every time I tried to film her painting, Marla was distracted or unwilling.
At first, it made sense to me that a four-year-old wouldn't slip into a creative reverie with a group of strange adults gathered around her. Was my documentary crew interrupting the very process it was supposed to be capturing? Or was something more sinister going on? And how should I depict the Olmstead family if I didn't know for sure whether Marla did the paintings? I had 100 hours of tape I needed to cull down into a 90-minute film. The inclusion of a possibly cagey facial expression, the exclusion of a peculiar off camera aside, these cuts would point my audience toward conclusions, and these conclusions would have real world consequences for the Olmsteads. What should guide my editorial decision making process? And further, after six months of visits with this little girl and her family, was I really evaluating these questions with sober journalistic detachment, or was my perspective colored by my feelings of friendship -- or, for that matter, my desire to make a dramatic movie?
The recent and unprecedented popularity of non-fiction films has led many to call this a "golden age" for documentaries. The cinema-going public has discovered that a theatrical documentary shares what we like and expect from scripted films; a three act dramatic arc and larger than life characters -- with the extra voyeuristic enjoyment of "real life." The documentary screen appears to us a lot like the picture frame must have seemed to audiences of representational paintings one hundred years ago: a window into another reality.
But is the screen really a window, and are the things it seems to show us the real world, or constructions? The more I struggled with my own "canvas," the more truthful it felt to draw attention, at least in a small way, to the act of depicting itself. To pretend My Kid Could Paint That is simply a window into the life of a family would be like pretending that a painted mountain was a mountain, and a painted figure a person.
Maybe Jackson Pollock was on to something after all.
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT will screen at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival and open theatrically in the United States on October 5th.
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I like the idea. I always laugh at people aho think pollock and those like him have ANY talent.
Pretentious fingerpainters.
You are correct any child and many animals could do better than these phonies.
Cont'd...
The other idea is the idea of investment. Anyone who buys art as speculation deserves the unpredictability of the art market. A subset of this is the totemic quality of the object as separate from its aesthetic merits. That's your Kerouac's typewriter point, and there again the "who" issue becomes important. No one would buy Kerouac's typewriter for its utility or appearance. It is only valuable the same way a saint's relic or a movie star's autograph is valuable.
Marla's story is interesting because she found herself at the intersection of all of these issues of art, money, celebrity, and media, and because she is indisputably innocent and probably a victim of exploitation (whether she feels injured or not). Your movie is interesting because it explores all of that plus the issues of journalistic ethics (your own and those of the very impressive columnist who first wrote about Marla). Indeed, I thought the points about journalism and criticism were some of the movie's high points.
I saw the movie and enjoyed it very much. I felt awful for Marla's mother, who seems like a lovely, thoughtful, devoted parent. Her father was clearly starstruck and terrified. What parent of a four-year-old, no matter how talented, could watch her without saying, "Careful not to drip on the rug, honey. That's great! Can you do another one even bigger? Try this brush and see how it changes the design." That's part of parenting.
I think people get two ideas mixed up. One is art, which is purely subjective. If you like it so much you want to look at it all the time, buy it. Better, if you can't live without it, buy it. If (as with one of the people in the movie) you look at an image and see a person next to a door, that's fine, whether that was the artist's intention or not. If you like the image, does it matter whether it was done by Marla or her dad or Jackson Pollack or some guy we never heard of? That's the story, not the painting. This point is nicely raised in a scene where the gallery owner persuades a couple to buy the Ocean painting not because it is the most beautiful but because it was in the DVD and is therefore more "collectable." But the who does matter if we're talking about innocence and precocity or the re-enactment of those qualities by an adult, which could either be an artistic statement (as with Dubuffet's versions of children's drawings) or, well, forgery and fraud.
Cont'd....
Yeah, that's crazy to think about ~ your statement : "Isn't it the same painting whether a four-year-old or a 40-year-old made it?"
I guess you would have to further ask WHY they bought the piece of artwork...was it to support the child ? Was it to hang on the wall and BOAST over at dinner parties , like "Oh look the four year old painted this and I just paid for her college education." Or who knows...
anyways...
HOPE FOR VEGAN DINNER PARTIES all around.
I think I missed your response to the question if the painting is different if the painter is older. If one views the art piece as utilitarian, then no.
But we assume that adults have experience and understand choices and so when a child paints an adult-quality piece, then perhaps the child is a prodigy, can short-circuit 20 years of education, and is on her way to being a genius.
As the "value" of a living artist's work includes a premium for name recognition and a premium as to speculative value, the child's painting demands a higher price than the parent's, since the child has more potential. The painting is different in the same way an event in Act I is different than the textually same event in Act III.
The rapid price deflation provides a fascinating insight into the magnitudes of the utilitarian value, the name factor, and the speculative premium.
i like your process - creativity, as opposed to the "agenda," which poisons so many documentaries. "mediation" has been extensively explored in 20th century art. gerhardt richter and sherrie levine are obvious examples. Curiously, it is appearing in quantum physics, and the “observation effect” is turning up very strange conclusions.
as for your initial premise, it seems that the price on this child's paintings escalated dramatically due to the "hype/fame" factor (aka, Britney’s hair on eBay) and "story" value (kerouac's typewriter), rather than "conceptual" value (aka, rothko, pollock, duchamps), or "visual beauty" (decorative works or illustration).
although there’s usually some cross-over between one or more of these factors, arguably these are radically different valuation scales, with conceptualism holding the key to “artistic value.”
conceptual value was likely non-existent for someone so young, and "visual beauty" did not sustain prices, so we are left with the first two theories of valuation almost exclusively. Although there has been a LOT of "hype" and "story" value to works by Warhol, Van Gogh, Damien Hirst, Karen Finley, etc., and many of them are visually beautiful, there was always a highly intelligent, deeply conceptual component to the work separating it from mere decoration, consumerist frenzy, or pop culture.
Many in the "art world" would say this distinction is what qualifies work as "valuable" or even as "art" at all. a filthy paperback of Kerouac's written word, after all, is far more "artistically valuable" than is his typewriter. suicide, murder, love affairs, mental illness, addiction, etc. contribute to back-story. Beautiful colors, shapes and scale appeal to the eye even in purely illustrative work. but ultimately the deep, intuitive understanding of culture and human need, the desire to say something beyond the immediately apparent, and a fresh voice is what makes a Warhol, Pollock or Van Gogh compelling.
Perhaps Marla was not (yet?) capable of tapping into the conceptual power to tell a story, make a statement, or ask an important question in paint, so the emperor is still clothed, and the valuations were unrelated to artistic merit all along...
I have to say, the pictures the elephant creates at our local safari park are quite interesting and I've watched him paint them with my own eyes. He chooses the colours very thoughtfully. The chimp at the same park really isn't much of an artist though, he just flings the paint and some of it sticks. *lol*
"I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting."
I'm happy to have read that. It was my first instinct when I saw one of her pictures and the length of some of the continuous lines looked to be far past her arm reach. It just didn't seem physically possible. I look forward to seeing the doc.
The preview ( http://www.sonyclassics.com/mykidcouldpaintthat/ ) looks awesome and I had put it on my Toronto Film Festival list before reading this article. I have a conflict on the 8th so I'm hoping to see it on the 10th.
An art dealer once went to Pablo Picasso and said, "I have a bunch of 'Picasso' canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?" Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, "Wait a minute, Pablo. That's no forgery. I was visiting you the weekend you painted it." Picasso replied imperturbably, "No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe."
(shamelessly copied from http://www.rawilson.com/ishtar.shtml )
The father of a friend of my husband's was an abstract artist about 30 years ago. His works sold well enough in southern CA galleries. One day, he decided to frame the cloth he'd been using to wipe his hands while painting to see what would happen. It ended up fetching a higher price than anything he had deliberately created to that point. Not only could a small child paint abstract art any idiot with several thousand dollars to burn and no respect for art history sell that well, they could set a drop cloth under her easel and sell that, too.
I lost interest in modernist establishment art decades ago. It's all a con job. They have no credibility in telling anybody what is or isn't art.
Try out some art your kid COULDN'T paint...
http://www.artrenewal.org/
I couldn't have said it better myself. Modern art is B.S. From Jackson Pollock's drippings to Andy Warhol's soup cans it's all just a con job.
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