My Kid Could Paint That

Just finished watching My Kid Could Paint That , a documentary on a four-year-old girl, Marla Olmstead, who started painting abstract art that seemed beyond the usual blobs and swishes that, well, my kid could paint. Her paintings started selling for tens of thousands of dollars, articles and news stories ran worldwide about her, and the filmmaker started making his documentary about her.

Then a 60 Minutes story ran about Marla, raising questions as to whether she had painted some of her paintings. The documentary film crew is there at the same time, filming their reaction to the 60 Minutes piece, and then the documentary itself takes a left turn and itself questions the truthfulness of the paintings.

And that is the key to what I liked so much about this documentary: the age-old question "what is truth?" There's multiple layers of this question present in this film. It's discussed when an art historian goes into why people dislike modern art (many consider it less "truthful" than imagery that is more realistic and therefore ostensibly more "truthful"). It's in the background when everyone is trying to get Marla to paint a piece, start to finish, while a camera rolls... hoping that that will once and for all confirm the fact that Marla painted the paintings all by herself (which of course got me thinking about Heisenberg and how the act of measuring, even at a subatomic level, influences the actions). The filmmaker even points out that his film has varying levels of truth, by deciding what to show and what to edit out (the scene towards the end of the film with a Times reporter in particular hammers this point home).

Not the slickest documentary out there, but an interesting story, and an interesting story about the story.