I watched the popular 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That over the weekend, and I came away very interested, stimulated, and impressed. The story is one of a 4 year old child, Marla Olmstead, who executes beautiful abstract paintings on large (for her size) canvases. They sell for upwards of $20,000. Something funny though; whenever a camera was recording Marla paint, the work she did was sub-par. It looked like what it was, a four year old girl getting dirty and smearing paint over a canvas. The end results were not, seemingly, as good as the other paintings she’d produced and sold. Her parents explained it away by saying she was nervous, she did silly things, etc. Here the plot thickens; the father is an amateur artist himself. 60 Minutes did an expose on the family, essentially declaring Marla a fraud. The Olmsteads retaliated by releasing their own DVD, The Making of Ocean, which shows Marla making a painting from beginning to end, apparently with no help. This was the result:
For a child not yet old enough for Kindergarden, that’s not bad at all. But is it art? One of the more essential questions asked in the doc is: What is the worth of modern art? If “your kid could paint that,” does that mean it’s not art? Is a 4 year old capable of great art, of interpretive genius? Do you measure worth through the value of the paintings?
Look again at Ocean. Notice a few things about it.
The lines on the painting are mostly thick. With a few variations, the lines are thick and unsteady. The colors are unsophisticated in a cohesive sense. We see very little mixing between colors, between “zones.” When color is mixed, it’s not done with a deft or sophisticated sense; it’s merely on top of another color, or smeared. There are no brushstrokes, no clear intermingling of complimentary color. There are Mickey Mouse ears.
Now look at some of Marla’s other paintings; paintings which have sold for huge amounts of money, and which the Olmsteads claim she did herself, with no help or input whatsoever.
Take note of the fine, thin lines. The sophisticated mixing of colors to achieve the muted backgrounds. Note how the backgrounds fade into one another. Notice how the colors are complimentary. Notice how the same symbols are repeated with integrity and reasonable precision.
Here we have a super-advanced sense of blending, color, brushwork, and, again, complimentary color.
Decide for yourself. Decide this as well; how do we judge modern art?
My Kid Could Paint That was directed by Amir Bar-Lev.