My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary filmed largely in 2005 following the story of a four year old girl who became famous for creating abstract paintings. The story has a lot of natural hooks. First, it's potentially the story of a child genius--a toddler who can paint with the same skill of Jackson Pollock. But it's also a story about modern art: Don't believe that Jackson Pollock really did anything? Well, here is a four year old to prove it.
Those are the two aspects that seem to have drawn the filmmaker, Amir Bar-Lev, into the story. But he got into a story that he didn't fully understand. The four year old, Marla, is the daughter of an amateur artist, and she apparently began painting after her father gave her some materials. Marla has and initial flush of fame--an article in her home town newspaper leads to the New York Times, which leads to other magazines, and then television. And this all naturally leads to a media backlash.
Charlie Rose, working on 60 Minutes went looking for fraud and managed to find a little evidence. The father repeatedly claims that cameras change Marla's behavior, and it is therefore difficult to show her working. To solve the problem, 60 Minutes installed a hidden camera to catch her painting naturally, but on the film, it also caught the father encouraging her to paint. And when the tapes of Marla painting were shown to a child psychologist, the psychologist didn't see anything in her behavior that demonstrated unusual genius for a child.
These charges of fraud essentially destroy the narrative that had been built up around the girl, but there is no resolution to the competing stories. There is no way to show fraud, but there is no way to prove this little girl made these paintings herself. Ultimately, it was a good documentary. Well constructed, tightly controlled, and an interesting subject. That's about as much as anyone can say for any documentary.
Some of it's themes are worth mentioning, though. First, the woman who wrote the initial newspaper story about Marla came to see the episode as a demonstration of how the media works--grabbing onto an interesting story, pumping it for all it's worth, and then turning against the subject in order to keep the story going. That is certainly a good way of interpreting it.
Second, it is a story about modern art, and it presents the interesting idea that abstract art, because it is abstract, necessarily relies on the story of the person who made it. In one of the special features, Bar-Lev notes that you can have two identical objects but one will have more value if, for example, you can show a connection to Abraham Lincoln. Abstract art is not simply about the quality of the art, but also about who made it.
Finally, this was a story about this family. The father is a manager at a factory, the wife a dental assistant. The wife claims to have her child's best interests are heart and appears to be genuinely hurt when the story about her child changes. It's odd, however, that they continue to exploit their daughter. The 60 Minutes piece happened in 2005. They kept putting their daughter out for this sort of scrutiny in 2006, 2007, and presumably this year as well. The difference between their intentions and their actions is really strange.
So, good movie, worth watching.
