My Kid Could Paint That
Watched this movie last night. What starts off as a pretty interesting documentary about the relative value of art, sort of starts to devolve into a story about whether or not the little girl is actually the one painting the paintings, or if it’s a hoax. I give the filmmaker credit for including material showing his own inner conflict about pursuing the hoax storyline, and generally showing us that he wishes he could believe that it was all the little girl. There’s definitely food for thought there, but in the end I kind of wish that he’d chosen not to release his movie, since it became more about the mystery, and less about modern art. It’s just one more layer of scrutiny into this little girl’s life.
I was thinking though, that a more interesting question than simply “did the girl do the paintings?”, is the question of “why would it make the paintings any less valuable if they weren’t painted by a four year old?”. Whether or not she painted them, don’t the actual paintings themselves remain the same? What gives them value?
This does get addressed, I’ll admit. I just wish the film could have remained tightly focused in this way. One scene I really liked was when the gallery owner who sells the paintings, who is a photorealist painter himself, speaks of his own frustrations in an art world that deems his work, which takes him months, less valuable than an abstract painting which took far less time. Do we value art based on the hours that it took to create? Like an hourly rate? Or, is there no practical way to quantify what’s good and what’s bad?
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Sounds really interesting, but I don’t think I could watch it for some of the same reasons you wish you hadn’t. I read a lot of books about art forgery and the same question comes up; does it really matter who painted the image if it’s good? The art market so skews what’s really thought about art. I like Ed Harris speaking as Pollock in the same movie when he said, “Can’t people just come and look at the pictures?” The amount of time, the materials, nothing behind the technical making of a painting should matter. What’s good and what’s bad is totally dependent on the viewer. Art exists on its own. Having someone say it’s good doesn’t change its intrinsic nature at all, only how we allow ourselves to perceive it.
It also seems to be an issue of intention vs. effect with a whole lot of context influencing both. No matter the intention and study and deliberation of an artist, once the work is on the wall (or screen, or page) it’s up to the viewer and context of its position in the world to complete the conversation.
People are less likely to respect work by children or forgers because it feels like they were duped into a different conversation than the one they thought they were having, not unlike the unholy mysteries of internet dating.
Similarly, Pollack’s work DID have an intellectual component that directly engaged with and challenged the accepted standards of painting at the time while it also made for purely visceral viewing. Monkey scrawls might look the same but aren’t asking the same questions.
I went to see that movie “Exit Through The Gift Shop”, which was a lot more entertaining than this film, but also raised some of the same types of conversations about Art vs. Commerce.
RE: “modern art” – I have more patience than many of my friends for abstraction, and am even able to find value in the worst kind of performance art. This is all thanks to a Mason Gross education, where I learned all about looking for message and meaning in fine-art, even if nobody ever taught me how to use oil paints properly.
The commerce question is a strange one. I can sympathize with two main drivers for keeping the price of paintings crazy-high. There’s the basic desire to own something beautiful and put it up in your home, and there’s the practical purpose of finding a way to invest money into something that’s going to increase in value. I’d be interested in doing the former, but don’t really have the funds to ever seriously think about the latter.
PS – Mike Lapinski: that Mason Gross dig was just for you. I know we talked about it last time we got together. It’s still funny to me.
Sorry about the ‘L’ confusion. There’s a lot of Mikes here. Admittedly, forgers are trying to make art that’s taken for the ‘real thing,’ and as such, make money for it. That’s their intent. But it seems that they also take pride in what they do, and the best ones try to make paintings in the style of the artist they’re forging and not direct copies. I speak of Van Meegeren and De Hory in particular. I do agree that intent means a great deal, and that ‘art’ made by chimps, elephants and other animals doesn’t count as it’s not intentional.
For a really good look at the art world and how it works, I highly recommend, “Seven Days in the Art World.”
And thanks for the comics, too. I really enjoy them as well!
I watched that Art World reality show on Bravo with my fiancee the other day.
She was surprised to see that artists had to frame and hang their own work and it reminded me how we had an art show at Mason Gross but never really got around to learning the basics of displaying your art.
Even as a design student, the teachers were less interested in teaching us Photoshop (“You can get that from a book”) in lieu of using the computer to make agit-prop posters.
I definitely appreciate the theoretical education but it’s made me pine for lost hours of actually DOING the craft or apprenticing under some mentor.