My Kid Could Paint That

Dir: Amir Bar-Lev

2007

**

Amir Bar-Lev’s 2007 documentary is a rather trivial affair that is far more sensationalist than it realises. It focuses on Marla Olmstead, a young girl from Binghamton, New York who gains fame first as a child prodigy painter of abstract art, and then becomes the subject of controversy concerning whether she truly completed the paintings herself or did so with her parents' assistance and/or direction. The taglines for the film were ‘Inspiration or Manipulation?’ and ‘American dream or art world scheme’ when the story was really all about hype that got out of control. The insight into the world of abstract art was slight and a little tenuous also but it makes for compulsive viewing. Marla's father, an amateur painter, describes to Bar-Lev how Marla used to watch him paint and would ask how she could help. He gave her her own canvas and supplies and after one of their friends asked to hang one of Marla's pictures in his coffee shop, they became surprised when people asked to buy them. A local newspaper reporter, Elizabeth Cohen, writes a piece about Marla, after first asking her parents if they really want her to do so. Cohen's story is picked up by The New York Times and Marla becomes a media celebrity, with appearances on television and shows at galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Sales of her work soon begin to earn her over $300,000. The tone of the documentary turns with a scene of Marla's parents watching a February 2005 report by CBS News 60 Minutes that questions whether Marla painted the works attributed to her. 60 Minutes enlisted the help of a child psychologist who studies cognition in the arts and gifted children. The 60 Minutes reporter, Charlie Rose, then shows the child psychologist what he describes as "50 minutes of videotape shot by us and by Marla's parents." After seeing this footage, the child psychologist states: "This is eye-opening to me, to see her actually painting." Rose asks her how this is "eye-opening." She responds: "Because she's not doing anything that a normal child wouldn't do. She's just kind of slowly pushing the paint around." At this point I nearly gave up, as it seemed that they were asking a child psychologist about abstract art, rather than child behaviour and the whole issue got muddied. The Olmsteads then agreed to permit CBS to set up a hidden camera in their home to tape their daughter painting a single piece in five hours over the course of a month which I have to say felt unethical and wrong. When the tapes were reviewed, the psychologist said, "I saw no evidence that she was a child prodigy in painting. I saw a normal, charming, adorable child painting the way preschool children paint, except that she had a coach that kept her going." It was then indicated that the painting created before CBS's hidden camera looked less polished than some of Marla's previous works. Asked to explain the difference, the psychologist stated: "I can only speculate. I don't see Marla as having made, or at least completed, the more polished looking paintings, because they look like a different painter. Either somebody else painted them start to finish, or somebody else doctored them up. Or, Marla just miraculously paints in a completely different way than we see on her home video". It is the least scientific bit of investigation you’ll see in a documentary investigation. Marla's parents film her creating a second work, Ocean, but director Bar-Lev is not fully convinced. We see a couple that are considering the purchase of Ocean but the woman complains that it does not look like the other works by Marla. They buy it anyway and I smell a set up. In a slide show, Bar-Lev compares Ocean with the 60 Minutes piece and then with several other works attributed to Marla. We are left to make their own judgments. My Kid Could Paint That also raises questions about the nature of art, especially abstract expressionism, the nature of the documentary process, and the perception that the media imparts fame to subjects only to later subject them to intense scrutiny and criticism. It totally misunderstands the concept of abstract expressionism and utterly contradicts itself along the way. I’m not sure what the question really is. Art is in the eye of the beholder, who can say whether or not Marla Olmstead is a genius or not, but then why ask that question. Her paintings are aesthetically pleasing to most people and some of those people are prepared to pay a lot of money for them. That’s it really. Sure her father is also a painter and maybe coaches her but most great artists went to art school, I really don’t see any difference. Do I think Maria 100% painted all of the paintings herself? To be honest, I don’t really care. This film isn’t about deceit or about art, it is about how trivial our media has become and how little Amir Bar-Lev knows about art. Bar-Lev’s film is manipulative and breaks too many documentary rules to be taken too seriously – he may well be correct in his views but he does a poor job of presenting them accurately and without scrutiny – making his film preposterous and a little ironic.