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culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.

My Kid Could Paint ThatDoes Marla Olmstead's work belong in a museum or on the fridge?

By Mia Fineman
Posted Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, at 7:33 AM ET

To listen to Slate's Spoiler Special about My Kid Could Paint That, click here to download the MP3 file. You can subscribe to the Spoiler Special podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Marla Olmstead in My Kid Could Paint That

Marla Olmstead made her first abstract painting while still in diapers, crouching on her parents' dining-room table. She was not yet 2. Her big break came when she was 3, and a family friend hung her paintings in a coffee shop in her hometown of Binghamton, N.Y. By the time she was 4, she was scarfing down cookies at the packed opening of her first solo gallery show. A local reporter covered the story, and the New York Times picked it up. Soon, news crews from all over were rushing to report on the adorable blond moppet and her colorful canvases, calling her a "budding Picasso," a "pint-sized Pollock." Within a few months, she sold more than $300,000 worth of paintings. And then, just short of her 5^th birthday, the bubble burst. In February 2005, 60 Minutes aired a report by Charlie Rose implying that Marla's father, a night-shift manager at a Frito-Lay plant and an amateur painter himself, was guiding her compositions. Sales of the paintings quickly dried up, the family was barraged with hate mail, and the New York Post gleefully piled on the puns, reporting that "the juvenile Jackson Pollock may actually be a full-fledged Willem de Frauding."

In his new documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, director Amir Bar-Lev traces Marla's sensational rise and fall, focusing on the media feeding frenzy and on the Olmsteads' efforts to prove that Marla created her paintings unaided. Whatever the degree of parental coaching, Bar-Lev's footage reveals a child who clearly enjoys painting. We see her squeezing gobs of thick acrylic paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, smooshing it around with brushes, fingers, and spatulas, and using plastic squeeze bottles to add delicate squiggles and swirls. Yet, when Bar-Lev tries to film her creating a single work from start to finish, the camera-shy toddler grows silly and restless, and in one incriminating scene, begs her father to draw a smiley face on her picture. (He declines, grinning nervously.)

The possibility of fraud is the film's narrative engine, and Bar-Lev isn't shy about voicing his own doubts about the works' authenticity, or reflecting, a la Janet Malcolm, on the queasy blend of complicity and betrayal that typifies the relationship between journalist and subject. In one excruciating scene, Bar-Lev shares his misgivings about the paintings with Marla's mother, Laura, a dental technician. "I need you to believe me," she says, staring into the camera. The interview ends in tears.

All this makes for a fascinating story about stage parents, media hype, and the ethics of documentary filmmaking. But in focusing on Marla as a media and market phenomenon, the film gives short shrift to some of the more intriguing questions about what it means to look at a 4-year-old's splattery abstract canvases in the context of art. Marla's paintings, with their swirling colors and expressive brushstrokes, have been compared repeatedly to the work of modern masters like Kandinsky and Pollock. Does it matter that she has no knowledge of these artistic precedents, and most likely, no clear concept of "art" itself? Is Marla a prodigy or a primitive? Can a work of art transcend the intentions of its maker? If a child can make great abstract paintings, does this mean that modern art is itself a hoax, a high-culture con game?

Ten years ago, I traveled around Thailand with Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, teaching domesticated elephants to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. The project was cheerfully satirical, but the elephants really did learn to paint, and their bold, gestural abstractions were strikingly similar to Marla's—and raised many of the same questions. Like Marla, elephants approach a blank canvas with a blithe lack of inhibition and no preconceived idea of what a painting is supposed to look like. What matters to them is the process: the friction of the brush against the surface of the canvas, the creamy viscosity of the paint, and the fine-motor activity involved in making different kinds of marks, from long sweeping strokes to quick rhythmic dabs and slithery caresses.