In 85 minutes, My Kid Could Paint That will give you an emotional rollercoaster ride, even as it challenges your assumptions, asks you how much you can trust your eyes, and presents you with confounding ethical questions... including, "Should I even be watching this?

I saw it last night, and I'm astonished that I can't find a thread about it here. It's a great conversation starter, and the DVD adds a follow-up report that should throw fuel on fiery debates.

I'm looking forward to following this kid's story as the years go on, just to learn as much as I can about the intriguing, maddening questions swirling around her.

But really, the film is about so much more than "Did Marla really paint those amazing, colorful canvases?" NYTimes art critic Michael Kimmelman brings essential perspective to the proceedings. I can't wait to show this to a discussion group sometime.

Rent it and watch it with friends!

I've revised my Favorites of 2007 list. This is now in the top three.

Just saw it.

I think it's a good film, but I can only imagine how crazy it will be for those who have a solid education on modern abstract art. I don't, and I share the point of view of that Binghamton artist who also thinks modern art is a sham. I still remember the scene in Oliver Stone's Wall Street where a penthouse suite was overchanged by some awful 80s expressionistic works, and Daryl Hannah trying to explain it all. Yeeuch.

Growing up in New York, I saw a lot of this, but we also have the best art galleries in the world, and I can appreciate art that teeters inbetween modern art and the classical pieces. Like Monet, Van Gogh, or that peace that Cameron Frye was fixated upon in Ferris Bueller.

But that said, I also thought of _Searching For Bobby Fisher_, which is an exceptional edutainment about parents of child prodigies, even tho it goes into cliched territory towards the end. And you know, it really doesn't matter... if a rich Hummer-owner wishes to spend his hard-earned dollars on an overpriced painting that contains color and hints of a baby sonogram, all happiness to him. What upped the pricetag was the story, and there should be no shame in a child being coached by her Dad, but the artworld is strange that way...

Nick

FWIW, my film-fest capsule review.

I also burst out laughing when I read this paragraph of Jeffrey Wells's review a few months back:

And perhaps "maybe" is all one can say about this situation. Maybe a definitive bust or exoneration is out of the question. But I don't want fucking maybes when I go to see a movie. The only way I'll accept them is when the filmmaker somehow conveys what he/she really thinks, and persuades me to come to the same gut conclusions. If there's no clarity or closure or at least some kind of ending that has a discernible undercurrent, then whadaya whadaya?

Me, I love the unresolved ambiguities. But whadaya whadaya, indeed.

Which, of course, is Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Just caught this one and WOW!! The heavy thematic lifting done so organically by this film left my head spinning. Just when I think the film is about one thing, it goes deeper, and then again. This is what self-aware/meta art CAN be when it's done sublimely. Fantastic.

Here's my five-year-old's review of the film.

My first blog entry for Image journal is up. And it's about this film.

Nice. That movie has sparked lots of conversation around my house and amongst my friends.

I watched My Kid Could Paint That this weekend

My wife has taught elementary school art for many years. I always find kids art amazing. There is a natural sense of design, enthusiasm and freedom that is a joy to behold while it lasts.

There is an element to modern art that seeks to re-capture that lost freedom of childhood art making. To not be beholden to subject matter, to freely explore the materials for their own sake, to find joy in pure color, shape and line are hallmarks of both children’s art and the art of many of the pioneers of modern art making. I’m thinking of Kandinsky, Klee, Delaunay, Dubuffet, Pollack… the list could go on.

So I am not surprised to find a four year old, by the name of Marla, who can make non-representational art that can hold its own when hung in a commercial gallery. She is the epitome of what is great in childhood creativity and modern art that attempts to achieve that return to childhood freedom. Her paintings are really very good as best I can tell from watching the documentary on her. Off course the same elements come into play that make contemporary artists worth collecting come into play here. A gallery owner who is a professional, an expert, chooses to display this work and asks large sums of money for the paintings therefore legitimizing it. Secondly, the work is written about by a regarded art critic that further grants the work credence. It is the same process that legitimized Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Whether that process IS legitimate is another discussion.

To the untrained eye the kind of painting that Marla is doing looks easy, as the title says, like any child could do it. And this is somewhat true. Marla does what most kids do but with a heightened intuition ( and really big canvas and high quality materials). But once a child becomes self-conscious, which they all do, and gains a desire to represent the world in a realistic way, this ability to paint so freely disappears. For a post-childhood artist to paint this freely is indeed very difficult. To paint something that looks so spontaneous and lacking self-consciousness takes much hard work. That is why I don’t think her Dad helped her. I don’t think he has the chops. On the other hand without his support-providing the large canvases, a constant supply of paint and brushes and doing the clean up, the work as presented in the gallery wouldn’t have happened. Any artist would love to have Marla’s Dad for a studio assistant. The parent’s willingness to be filmed is a good argument against the charge of their duplicitousness. It would be hard to hide the Dad’s involvement if he had been working on the paintings rather than just being an assistant.

I do find the parent’s willingness to put their four year old daughter in the spotlight morally objectionable. It is difficult for adults to handle the kind of success that this child has achieved. I can’t help but think Marla is going to suffer for the acclaim she has received, particularly when she reaches the age when she desires to represent the world figuratively. What happens then?? She will not be able to transition to painting figuratively overnight. Those skills take a long time and much hard work to develop. Are the parents and the gallery owner going to let go of their cash cow?

I did have several questions: How long did it take her to finish one painting? I assume she worked on the same painting multiple times due to the short attention span of a child her age. Did it take her a couple of days? A couple of weeks?
Did she ever make paintings that weren’t good enough to sell?

I would liked to have gotten a sense of what else Marla’s life was like? Did she watch TV? Play with dolls? Ride trikes? We saw her playing with a water hose. I didn’t really get a sense of who Marla was apart from her being able to paint.

A couple of the questions that I had were: Why her compositions suffered when the cameras were on? Was it simply self conciousness at the attention,wanting to perform well for the adults? Was it that while the cameras were on her Dad couldn't offer advice with the choices she was making? I agree that he probably doesn't have the painting chops to pull it off, he does have a pretty solid understanding of fundamentals though. He has obviously studied painting, to what degree I am not sure but he has basic color theory and composition. All the men in Marla's life seem well aware of and are skeptical of abstract art.

I think with the exception of the painting she did in the hidden video that became a marketing tool, all the painting she did under observation didn't go for sale. I could be wrong because they don't really follow the paintings.

Marla really seemed like a sweet kid, most of the adults around her started to creep me out. The Mom, not so much but she truly seems bewildered by the whole thing. Like it was all some kind of magic. I thought her fear for her daughter was well founded.

and Now: "My Horse Could Paint that"....

From CNN

His artwork has been described as having the "fire of Pollock" and the "fixed gaze of Resnick."

"Yes, it's a novelty that a horse can paint," she said. "But it's not about novelty anymore. It's about his validation as an artist."

and my favorite..........

"We live in a world with constantly shifting boundaries and obviously expanding definitions," said Kurt Kohl, curator at The Art Cafe.

"The horse is creating art on the level of a very young child," he said. "There may not be a lot of thought behind the process, but one could also ask the same question about Pollock or De Kooning or Rothko."

Don't forget the paintings made by Koko the Gorilla (the animal that inspired the title of Daniel Amos's arguably best album).