Off the top, one should quote Picasso for fun context: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” My Kid Could Paint That tracks the rapid success of four year-old Marla Olmstead in a straightforward, largely chronological fashion. We get the townsfolk from her small western New York town weighing in on her humble beginnings showing her work in local cafes, followed by her graduating to exhibitions in legit gallery spaces. Enter the media, first with local journalists writing family interest pieces on Marla until, and then with the likes of the New York Times picking up on her story and running with it. Lather rinse repeat until it comes time for Marla’s story to appear on 60 Minutes when, lo and behold, the media machine needs a new perspective to interrogate from and a scandal develops when the nightly news show posits that perhaps young Marla didn’t indeed do the work herself and perhaps she’s had an overly guiding hand borrowed from her father.
The thing about this movie is that it does not matter one iota whether or not Marla did indeed create the paintings her family claims she has. It doesn’t, it really, really doesn’t. The true identity of the artist, whether it be Marla or her father or the two of them working as a team, doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the film because the movie isn’t really about Marla herself or her work so much as how modern art functions in society, the position of the collector and the critic, the simultaneous status of the artist as vaulted genius and complete fraud, etc. These are ultimately the same questions people have been arguing themselves sick over since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal in 1917 (and likely long before, but I think Duchamp really stands out in people’s mind for this sort of thing), so the film doesn’t necessarily cover any new ground here except for the fact that instead of having Dadaists making the news, we now have kindergartners stirring up the trouble. Which, given that standard definitions of “dada” have it meaning either a child’s term “hobby-horse” or a completely nonsense word all together, might be fitting.
We have the curator, a man who is an artist in his own right and who has opened his own gallery and now chooses to show Marla’s work. We find out later on that he is a photorealist and because he feels that all modern art is of the “My kid could do that” variety, exhibiting Marla in his gallery is a giant FUCK YOU to the modernist art establishment because a kid literally did do it. For obvious reasons, this guy comes off as a totally embittered douchebag. He (or perhaps the filmmakers) only reveals his true motives for exhibiting Marla after the 60 minutes story breaks and he is forced to deal with a loss of sales and a maligning of his reputation. Hysterically, he later exhibits another show of Marla’s work and is seen talking Marla’s work up to a prospective buyer, telling her that the piece she’s interested in could totally be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art* and how great the work is despite the fact that it’s in a style he completely reviles. I was disappointed that he was the only artist interviewed for the documentary; it would have been nice to see what other professional artists thought of this wunderkind.
*If I were a modernist painter, I’d rather be hanging in the MoMA than the Met, to be honest.
Then we have the collectors. We have the small town collectors who purchased the art because they like it and we have the large private collectors with wheelbarrows of money to burn who purchased the art because it was trendy to do so. The amazing thing, though, is that despite the initial reasons for purchasing the works, when the news breaks that Marla may not have done the work herself, everyone reacts the same: they don’t know what to think, they’re disappointed, they don’t know if they want their pieces anymore, maybe they’ll file a lawsuit, blah blah blah. If you liked the piece to buy it enough in the first place, what has changed? Does the questioning of the true identity of the artist change how you feel about the painting? You like it one minute and suddenly not the next? There’s a line in The Break-Up where Jennifer Aniston’s character is talking to a potential buyer and she tells him that she can’t tell him what to buy because he has to really love it, he’s the one who has to live with it and I wonder what the heck ever happened to people who buy something because, you know, they actually like it. This point is driven home strongly towards the end when this woman is nearly bullied into buying one of Marla’s paintings — one they taped her painting from start to finish to prove that she is indeed the creator of her pieces — and even though she keeps blustering that she is unsure she wants it, that she doesn’t think the person who painted that piece is the same as the one who painted everything else in the show, her husband and the curator use slick marketing speak to convince her and eventually she goes “I guess I’ll take that one.” I guess? I guess?! If you feel utterly resigned about purchasing a piece of art, maybe that’s a giant neon clue that that piece is not for you. Then again, if I had $20,000 to casually drop on a painting I wasn’t terribly interested in, maybe I wouldn’t care that much either.
Finally, we come to Marla’s parents, who are literally night and day since they work different shifts — she works in a dental office during the day, he works as a night manager at a Frito-Lay factory at night — and thus don’t see a lot of each other and don’t necessarily hang out with the kids at the same time. Marla’s mother comes across as trying to protect her family through the ever increasing media exposure and she’s very vocal about how the choices she makes are affecting her family and she tries very hard to shield them from negative experiences. Marla’s father, on the other hand, seems almost starved for media attention and despite coming across as relatively laidback, he almost aggressively pursues the spotlight and is constantly saying yes to every opportunity for exposure that comes their way. The accusations about Marla’s father doing her paintings for her begin to fly and I think Marla’s mother genuinely believes that her daughter does all her work on her own.
The father, on the other hand, is a real smarmy kind of guy. Toward the end of the movie, there are two scenes in particular where his level of discomfort about what the camera is witnessing just makes him look so guilty. The scenes cut back and forth between a candid chat between the director and the parents, where the mother actually breaks down in tears about how for the sake of her family, the director (and by extension, the audience of the film) has to believe that Marla does her own work. This poor woman is so upset. Cue Joe Smarm just sort of sitting there denying that he assists Marla but his body language is so uncomfortable that you can just see the lie. The scene intercut with this one is of Marla being filmed painting in the kitchen and she starts commanding that her father should help her, that he should do this or that, that he should tell her if the painting is done, etc. and he begins to sputter at her, saying “No no no, I’m not going to tell you, it’s your painting.” He’s clearly putting on a show for the camera, as he does ten seconds later when he’s on the phone with someone saying “Yeah, Marla was being silly, she was asking me to do all this stuff to her painting, blah blah blah”. The film doesn’t ultimately decide for you whether or not Marla’s paintings are her own, but the honest footage of the father in these two scenes pretty much convinces you that Marla didn’t do the work on her own, at least not completely.
Also, they gave Marla really shitty paints to use, so that seemed pretty revealing to me. Those giant Liquitex tubes are okay for normal four year-olds who are just fucking around and making a mess, but if you’re trying to convince me that your daughter is an Artiste™, give her some quality materials to work with.
This movie asks a lot of questions but doesn’t provide a lot of answers, possibly because there aren’t any. I admit that I personally get really irritated whenever I hear “My kid could do that!” or “I could do that” because it’s like, okay, why the hell doesn’t your kid do it or why don’t you do it? It’s so, so easy to belittle art that is seemingly impenetrable to your average audience and yet I wonder why if art is so easy and making millions is so easy, why is it that the average Canadian artist only makes $5000 a year? Clearly there is a discrepancy between the production of art and the public perception of it. I think movies like this at least do us the service of providing the opportunity for dialogue about it in a mainstream format that doesn’t alienate people the way art journals or curatorial statements do.
In case you care, this is my favourite painting: White Square On White (1917) by Kasimir Malevich.