My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007)

In 2004, painter Marla Olmstead became as famous as one can in the art world with her large, abstract canvasses. The gimmick: she was four. Her work fetched higher and higher prices, until a 60 Minutes segment cast doubt on whether the pieces were created entirely without assistance from Marla's dad, night manager at the Frito factory and himself an amateur painter. The bottom then dropped out of the Marla market, and documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, already in the process of making a film about the kid and her art, faces an onscreen crisis of faith about whether to get on the side of the Olmsteads or the side of the chanting, accusatory rabble.

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A relative of mine was once heard to remark that, if you compare Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans to Leonardo's The Last Supper, it's no contest: clearly, the latter is in every way a superior painting. It seemed to me an odd statement to make, like declaring that, in a battle between the grapefruits and the Magna Carta, you obviously go with the Magna Carta every time. A similarly alien-to-me question, one I didn't realize so many people were asking, so angrily, lies under little Marla's story: is modern art just a big fraud?

Some appear to believe that, simply by virtue of the fact that the work of a four-year-old can sell for seven figures, abstract art must be baloney. The film's title is drawn from what's evidently a common sentiment, typically directed at the work of Jackson Pollock and his countless imitators: if even my kid possesses the motor skills to drip paint onto a canvas without the constraint of accurately depicting anything in the external world, then what makes these prized artifacts of abstract art worthy of so much more praise, analysis, and money?

That's actually a good question, but at its core is a flawed assumption which, in economics, is known as a labor theory of value. According to labor theories of value, the value of a commodity is set, in some fashion, by the labor required to produce it. That's not necessarily false, but empirically, you can pretty much rule out any direct or even sorta-direct labor-value correlation. As P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out, labor theories of value have a tough time explaining why we value a poem more than a hole in the ground. To make it come even close to reflecting real markets, you'd have to bend a labor theory of value so far out of shape that it would no longer merit the name.

In a market for, say, kitchen gadgets, a labor theory of value might at least be able to tell you something. In an art market, it tells you nothing. Especially stung by this is the gallery owner who first takes on Marla's paintings. The guy is a photorealist painter who missed the boat by thirty years, and you can tell that watching the disordered brushstrokes of a toddler fetch an order of magnitude more than his own painstaking streetscapes just kills him, even as he pockets the commission. Skimming from Marla's vogue is his bittersweet revenge, but it's snatched away when the suspicions arise. Yet another case of bad economic knowledge ruining lives.

I'm no philosopher of art, so I will reinvent the wheel in this discussion, but I think the controversy over Marla Olmstead is really about the issue of the intrinsic qualities of art objects versus the information associated with art objects, and which, if either, really matter. Detractors of modern art in general focus a tad too strongly on one element associated with an art object: "what went into it." When they think about abstract stuff, they assume that very little could have gone into it: some splotches, some blotches, some strokes here and there, and bam, two mil please. This in contrast to the decades of training and refinement necessarily required of a more representational artist, which I guess is what they believe they're paying for.

But I also think that supporters of Marla and the enterprise of modern art wrongheadedly place too much importance on information associated with, rather than the qualities contained in, art objects. (In the film, NYT art critic Michael Kimmelman flat-out states that, for most buyers, abstract art is about the story associated with it.) Who could seriously deny that a substantial amount of the premium on Marla's art at its peak — and maybe all of it — comes from her age? Painted at 34 rather than four, Marla's best-selling canvasses would maybe be notable, but never all the rage.

As an enthusiast of abstract art to the exclusion of most figurative art, I suppose I look as if I've got some blood on my hands. My money will one day become a factor pumping up the price of abstract pieces, because they're what I'll buy. But I defend myself thusly: I care only — only — about qualities actually contained within an object of art. I don't care if the thing was made by a baby, the hot sullen young Brit of the moment, or a retarded monkey piloting a malfunctioning robot. The important question is what aesthetic response it inspires within me, and to my mind, it's the only question. When I say that I like Josef Albers, I don't mean that I like whatever the German mathematician and painter named Josef Albers happened to paint; I mean there exists some work that I appreciate for its own qualities, and that happens to have been painted by a guy named Josef Albers. If it turns out that a stevedore named Alsef Joblers painted them instead, big deal.

All this, of course, isn't what My Kid Could Paint That is ostensibly concerned with. Midway through the film, when the 60 Minutes exposé (hosted by C to the R) airs, Bar-Lev suddenly becomes Nick Broomfield, which every filmmaker but Nick Broomfield is very bad at. He'd believed the Olmsteads' story that Marla did the paintings herself, but then again, footage of her painting process seems to suggest that she didn't, at least not entirely. What she paints on camera looks quite different from what she allegedly paints off-camera: when under the lens, she tends to squeeze out huge piles of color and mush them into the sludgy green-brown associated with childhood art classes, a process not evident in most of the work sold under her name. Oh, and when she's filmed, she's a lot more likely to paint a crude sun in one of the canvas' upper corners, or maybe the three-circle face of Mickey Mouse.

Marla's parents probably believe that their hands are completely off, I'll give them that. But it's a slippery slope from letting your baby sit on a canvas and paint to giving her coaching as she goes along, suggesting that a little more color might look good over there, applying a base coat to the canvas yourself — after all, that's just preparation — and only giving her one or two colors to work with at a time. But your guess is as good as mine. As abstract as I like my art, I can't really get with Marla's paintings — or, you know, the art objects associated with the name "Marla Olmstead", etc., etc.

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1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. Jason Reitman's Juno
14. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
15. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
16. Greg Mottola's Superbad
17. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
18. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
19. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
20. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
21. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
22. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
23. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
24. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

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