A fascinating film.

My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary by Amir Bar-Lev about Marla Olmstead, an adorable four-year-old girl in Binghamton, NY whose abstract paintings garner worldwide media attention, and sell for tens of thousands of dollars. The movie documents how she began to paint, how her work came to be showcased in galleries, and how questions arose through a 60 Minutes story regarding whether she really paints the works attributed to her all by herself.

One day, Marla's father Mark, an amateur painter, is asked by Marla if she can paint. Mark sets up some supplies for her, and subsequently, a friend asks to hang her work in his coffee shop. Eventually people offer to buy them and a local newspaper reporter, Elizabeth Cohen, writes a piece about Marla. Cohen's story is picked up by the New York Times, and Marla becomes a media celebrity, with appearances on television and shows at galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Sales of her work earn over $300,000. Marla's parents, Mark and Laura, are depicted as supportive and encouraging of their daughter, but not pushy stage parents who force her or her brother Zane to do anything they don't want to. More importantly, the point is made that Marla is a shy, somewhat introverted child at school, and seems to do her best work when she isn't being watched by people other than her parents.

Although I myself did not major in fine art in art school, and think that a lot of ado about abstract art today is pretentious, self-deceiving nonsense, some of Marla's works are indeed pleasing to the eye, whereas some do appear to be the type of painting that you'd expect from a four-year-old. I question whether it's possible to apply objective criteria to determine issues of aesthetics to Marla's paintings, but one thing I kept noticing over and over in watching the film is that there seems to be a level of patience and commitment in Marla that I wouldn't expect from a young child. She covers her canvases, some of which are several feet in area, completely, which many children would not have the patience to do. In many instances, she seems to have decided to apply a certain type of recurring brush stroke, like circular ones, or stipling, or small pointilist-type strokes, and actually manages to stick to that motif through the entire painting, or an entire section of it, which I would not think a young child would've done. In this way, Marla's paintings actually do seem to exhibit qualities that I wouldn't expect from other children her age.

The tone of the film changes when 60 Minutes broadcasts a 2005 story with Charlie Rose on Marla in which Ellen Winner, a child psychologist with expertise with gifted children, states that Marla's paintings are beautiful enough to be placed in the most prestigious museums. When winner is then shown footage of Marla painting, she is surprised that Marla seems to be doing nothing different from what other four-year olds do. When the Olmsteads agree to have CBS set up a hiddren camera to capture Marla painting, Winner declares, from the five accumulated hours of Marla creating a painting over the course of a month, that it is far less "polished" than her other paintings, and that she saw no evidence that Marla is a child prodigy, thus calling into question whether Mark or Laura helped or directed Marla in making the paintings.

What follows is a scandal, as the Olmsteads and their gallery contact, a photorealistic painter named Anthony Brunelli, are accused of fraud, suffer a drying up of painting sales, and become the target of appallingly hateful emails from strangers. It is here that the viewer finds it difficult to resist forming their own conclusion about whether Marla authored her own paintings.

Me, I question Ms. Winner's declaration that the recorded painting, "Flowers", was "less polished" than the others, and the manner in which nay-sayers in the film seem to unskeptically embrace her conclusion, because Winner was influenced by the fact that she knew ahead of time which painting was filmed during its creation, and which ones were not. I'd be very curious to see what the results would be of a proper double blind test: Have Marla create four or five paintings on camera, and then select four or five that she created without a camera. Show them to Ms. Winner, and see if she can pick out which ones are the "polished" ones, and which ones are the ones made on camera. If she can identify which are which, then it would eliminate the possibility that the difference is completely subjective, and Winner is just biased towards disbelieving that Marla is the painter, a possibility that no one suggests in the film.

Eventually, footage of Marla creating paintings from beginning to end is made, and is currently made available at her website. Patrons continue to pay thousands of dollars for her work, all of which goes into a college fund, and although Marla is initially oblivious to the controversy surrounding her, she is eventually told about the skepticism, which she finds both perplexing and flattering.

But this seems beside the point. The film seems to be more about the adults surrounding Marla, including not only her parents and supporters, but her detractors as well, and about notions of modern art, including whether some abstract works have any intrinsic quality apart from their hefty price tags, a point explored through interviews with Michael Kimmelman, a New York Times art critic who was used in both the film and the 60 Minutes story. Roger Ebert, for example, does not believe that Marla created her works. I would ask Mr. Ebert if he believes that Mozart created his works, or if he thinks he got help from an adult. Since history does not seem to lean toward the latter, why do we do so here? If Marla's father Mark helped her, why wouldn't he say so? He has no interest in art himself, it was not his or his wife's idea to showcase her art in galleries, and if he did indeed help Marla, wouldn't he be able to share credit as a collaborator? In any event, while I do not dismiss possibilities, I would not feel comfortable accusing Marla or her parents of the sort of dishonesty that they are accused of, without firm evidence establishing it.

The film offers a fair depiction of the issue, and is open-ended in its conclusion. Although director Amir Bar-Lev expresses some doubts about Marla's authorship, he asks questions rather than accusations, and an extra piece on the DVD goes into this further.

Watch the movie, check out Marla's work at her official website, and decide for yourself. You can view the film's trailer at the film's official site.

Interesting stuff. I like your idea of an actual double blind test since knowing which one we have proof positive she did by herself will skew an opinion without people realizing it. In the expert of gifted children says that she looks like any other 4 year old, not a gifted artist trying to create art I'd say that it says more about the art than the child. If she is just screwing around and having fun trying to put pretty colors on a canvas how is that different from a many grown up abstract artists? Personally I think that many modern artists are laughing all the way to the bank. They are putting pretty colors on canvas, they come up with some silly name for the piece, hang it an a gallery and let the "art critics" debate some meaning that never existed in the artists mind.

The whole thing actually reminds me of an episode of "King of the Hill." Peggy starts making robot like sculptures out of old propane tanks from Hank's job. She gets all of this interest from the art world but it all falls apart when they keep trying to come up with some crazy way of selling her and what's she's trying to do because "middle aged housewife making something for her husband's job" just doesn't cut it.

When people see her work, which is colorful, pleasing to the eye and as good as some of the stuff that you will see in professional art galleries they assume it comes from a great artist. When they hear it's a gifted kid they like it even more. If they think that it's just a little kid playing with colors suddenly there must be something else going on there because modern art can't be just random finger paintings of a normal child.

How about this for a test, put her "Flowers" painting among several from other abstract artists and see how many people could correctly identify which piece was made by a 4 year old. I'll bet that most couldn't, but if they were told ahead of time that it was hers they'd say that they could tell it looks a child's work and nothing like the real art around it. Just like how I do a little test for patrons at my bar. I have them 4 small glasses of Bud, Bud Lt, Coors Lt & Miller Lt. I number them and tell them which 4 they are and to match them up. Most people claim that they can do it, no problem, because they have a clear preference and like one better than the others. Most people don't even get 1 out of 4 right.

Roger Ebert, for example, does not believe that Marla created her works. I would ask Mr. Ebert if he believes that Mozart created his works, or if he thinks he got help from an adult. Since history does not seem to lean toward the latter, why do we do so here? If Marla's father Mark helped her, why wouldn't he say so? He has no interest in art himself, it was not his or his wife's idea to showcase her art in galleries, and if he did indeed help Marla, wouldn't he be able to share credit as a collaborator? In any event, while I do not dismiss possibilities, I would not feel comfortable accusing Marla or her parents of the sort of dishonesty that they are accused of, without firm evidence establishing it.

I think it's because Mozart lived long enough ago that it was more or less a different world. We say that he was special perhaps to the point of assigning almost mystical qualities to him.

I mean this in the same way that we tend to say that the construction of the pyramids was 'impossible' to the point of saying things like aliens must have helped out.

What I mean is we see things like this and say that it's impossible. But to paraphrase something Worf said in one TNG episode, "impossible us perhaps but not for her".

I think that while this need to say that she must be getting help may seem cruel and even dehumanizing, in my opinion it's our need to feel better about ourselves.

LOL. John Stossel actually did do a test like that in one of his 20/20 segments. He asked a bunch of art "experts" to look at some abstract works, and tell him what they thought. They gave the usual pretentious, pseudo-intellectual analyses, before Stossel revealed to them that they were made by a class of grade schoolers. It was hilarious. A clip of it is seen in the extras on the DVD.

You're saying that the world was different back then in such a way that made society more accepting of a musical child prodigy? In what way? Or are you saying that we accept it today because he lived so long ago? Well, that can't be it, because his ability was accepted when he lived, when he immediately began showing it. But no one, back then or now, thought it impossible.

But yeah, I agree with your overall idea that when someone like Winner says that, what they're saying is clearly filtered through their own biases.

You're saying that the world was different back then in such a way that made society more accepting of a musical child prodigy? In what way?

I think it's more that the world he lived in was different enough that it might be difficult to relate to or see ourselves in. Maybe we don't know what and what was not possible for an average person (let alone a prodigy) back then. So, we have less (mis)conceptions about the (im)possibilities and might be more accepting of prodigies of centuries ago.

I think a part of why we call them super geniuses or super humans is because even for ones of times perhaps long past, what they do (or did) may seem impossible. So, we assign qualities to them to make them seem almost mystical because in our (indeed biased) opinion, it may be the only explanation for how they did (or do) these things that to us are impossible.

In the end, I think it boils down to jealousy. We all like to think that we have a special place in the world. When we see someone that does and feel that we don't, jealousy kicks in and we think that they've cheated somehow and say things like 'yeah but that's only because...'.

As for how that can apply to people of the past. I think it's the whole idea of that being the past. Seeing someone else in the present getting what we perceive as something we should have (or should have had) sets off the jealousy.

Maybe it even gets down to insecurity. Seeing a four year old doing something that we didn't do until we were into (perhaps well into) adulthood or have yet to accomplish might make us feel very self conscious. What we don't see is all the other four year olds that are normal four year olds.

Maybe if we all saw footage of normal kids leading normal lives, we might see the special ones as special and stop feeling so jealous or insecure and then maybe stop trying to debunk them.

Kids are kids, Chris. And a work of a genius is a work of genius. I don't see how whether it occurred centuries ago has any bearing on that.