My Kid Could Paint That exposes the dark side of art

Amir Bar-Lev’s wrenching, suspenseful documentary about whether a 4-year-old named Marla Olmstead is an abstract-painting prodigy or a pawn of her parents, her dealer, and the press ends with Bob Dylan singing. “Someday,” he croons, “everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece.”

Everything became different for the Olmsteads. The film begins innocently, tracking Marla’s rise. Her parents offhandedly put her paintings in a friend’s coffee shop and people began to buy them. Things began to turn with the appearance of her art dealer, who describes the family, eerily, as “perfect” enough for “a Gap ad.”

Since this is our second exposure to the 2004 media blitz the movie documents, we know what’s to come, and begin straight away looking for motives. Marla sells her paintings for thousands of dollars, but why are people buying them? Why is her dealer selling them? Why does The New York Times respond with a story about an experiment it conducts on other children, testing whether they are prodigies?

We don’t have to look hard for any of these motives. The father, an amateur painter who loves the limelight and the limousines, is caught on a 60 Minutes hidden camera telling Marla which color to paint. Repeated attempts to get her to paint on camera are, dispiritingly, failures. The dealer confesses that he hates abstract art and relishes the idea of revealing it as a fraud. (He is a photorealist painter.)

Finally, things go meta. The anguished reporter who first broke the story in the Olmsteads’ hometown of Binghamton, New York, scolds the documentarian for exploiting his already exploited subject—an argument seconded by A. O. Scott in The New York Times, who argues that this film shouldn’t have been made at all.

I think he couldn’t be more wrong. My Kid Could Paint That is the most honest, direct movie about the dark side of art—especially in an art-illiterate country like this one—that I’ve ever seen. And there is a dark side. Not everybody’s in it for the love of the work, and it’s not all about the elevation of the human soul. Why do you think great art has always been so argumentative?

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT DIR. AMIR BAR-LEV | RATED PG-13 | AT SELECT THEATERS

Tags: art, Film, my kid could paint that