Friday, January 18, 2008

My Kid Could Paint That (2007)

R:  There have been a lot of noteworthy movies in the last semester.  Among all of the sturm und drang, there's a good chance that you didn't hear about “My Kid Could Paint That.”  The gist is that a girl from Binghamton, aged 3 or 4, became a hot thing in the Binghamton art world.  Well, not just in the Binghamton art world -- she popped up in the New York Times, and on 60 Minutes.  

The film comes in two parts.  As you might guess, the first half is the rise of Marla Olmstead, the painting wunderkind.  In one of the few bits of illuminating commentary in the movie, the journalist from the local newspaper who originally broke the story points out that the story went on too long to just be a human-interest piece, and had to “turn.”  And that's the second half of the movie -- the media turning on Marla and her family, and a series of accusations that Marla's dad (also a painter) is actually producing the paintings.  Or finishing them.  Or something.

As the movie drags on, the filmmaker becomes more and more prominent.  As I recall, he started filming the family before the story “turned,” and as it becomes more interesting I'd say it gets away from him.  The family trusts him long after he's stopped trusting them; much navel gazing follows.  In the end, I think the project was too big for him.

Clearly, I didn't like this movie.  I'm writing about it because it provoked as much conversation as any that we saw this semester.  There are the obvious (and clumsily handled) questions about what it can mean for abstract art to be “good” if it can be produced by a toddler.  Like the director, I'll leave that aside and focus on the issue of doubt.

Let's go back to the accusation that Marla isn't actually doing the painting.  This is not an unreasonable accusation -- her paintings are, indeed, more finished than one would expect from a small child.  They are remarkable for the same reason that they are suspect.  Indeed, “suspect” is probably a better word than “accusation,” because I don't recall anybody making a damning case against her having done the painting.  So how can one dispel those suspicions?  The method that 60 Minutes settles on (and the director, in a moment of inspiration, decides to...  continue...) is to try to video tape an entire painting, from start to finish.  The problem, not a surprising one, is that Marla reacts to the camera.  She's shy, and doesn't produce anything “for the camera” that looks as good as the paintings produced without the camera.  There's a lot of hemming and hawing about this, and in the end the Olmsteads are not able to satisfy “the public”, or at least the director.

The problem is that I don't think this is a test that Marla could pass.  As I mentioned above, she's shy and four, and I'm skeptical of the notion that any artists(even one that was grown-up and an attention whore) would be the same in front of a camera as they are working alone.  And so as outsiders we're in an awkward position: a question has been raised (”did she paint them!?”) that we, as outsiders are unable to answer.  And as social animals, we jump to the default conclusion -- she's cheating!

I'm more familiar with this feeling than I'd like to be.  Each term, I run a program that sifts through 800 undergraduate lab reports looking for plagiarism.  I then have to sift through the results and see which cases look like cheating, and which look like coincidences.  Once I get into the “find the cheaters!” mode, everything starts to look suspicious, and it can be very hard to step back and admit that some of the ambiguous cases are, well, ambiguous -- and not worth pursuing.  “It's unclear” is not a satisfying answer, but it's sometimes the correct answer.

Labels: ,

MIA

Well, it's been a busy couple of months.  Kate and I are both looking hard at the looming job market, so we've been watching fewer movies, and as you've noticed, not blogging.  A few movies from the past semester stood out not only as good, but as interesting to discuss, so we'll post on those as we can.  Maybe not full posts, but bloglets at least.  Kind of like this one.