The City by Marla Olmstead
So a 4-year-old cranks out big abstract paintings, some people buy them for thousands of dollars, other people gloat about the sham of modern art, and, inevitably, doubt is raised over whether the 4-year-old is getting help on her paintings from one of her parents. Sounds simple enough, and like something that has happened plenty of times before.
But Amir Bar-Lev’s new documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, is a mystery. (It will open this fall in Seattle; I saw an early screening today.) Bar-Lev travels so far into the center of the situation that he makes the human lust for “real” art—especially in a context where everybody declares that they know nothing about art—seem suspect, vain, and almost criminal, while at the same time utterly natural.
The film closes with a Bob Dylan song:
Someday, everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece.
Or, everything is gonna be different when you find a masterpiece, connect with it, and somehow make it yours, either by buying it or simply recognizing it, seeing it, and having it see you. Doesn’t everybody feel that way at least a little bit?
The toddler’s name is Marla Olmstead. She lives in Binghamton, N.Y., with her brother Zane, who is two years younger than she is, and her parents, Laura, a dental assistant, and Mark, an amateur painter and night manager at a Frito-Lay factory.
The first note I made in my notebook was about Marla’s art dealer, Anthony Brunelli. He introduced the family by describing every member as “perfect,” especially Marla and Zane, who “could be in Gap ads.”
Brunelli is probably the most unsavory character in the film. But he is the most revealing, too. Through all the twists and family dynamics—according to that footage, it looks like Marla made that painting, but according to this footage, it looks like she didn’t, but …—Brunelli looms in the background. He extols Marla’s genius on “60 Minutes” and praises the beauty of her paintings to his clients.
But he also divulges, when he’s exhausted of the publicity and when sales have slowed down because of the questioning, that he doesn’t like modern art. That he thinks it’s a “scam.” That it’s only through marketing that abstract art gains meaning. (Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times comes damn close to agreeing with Brunelli on this point, making the analogy to the relationship between Jackson Pollock’s raging persona and his wild paintings.)
Of course, by that logic, then, Brunelli is in the middle of perpetrating his own scam: selling Marla instead of the paintings. But Brunelli reveals more. We see him making his own photorealistic paintings, spending hours on details that the art world will not appreciate.
With Marla, “now, finally, I’ve got a way in,” Brunelli says.
The tensions between husband and wife, toddler and camera, are gripping. And there are deliciously painful sequences involving stereotypically clueless, Humvee-driving rich collectors that serve as reminders that, like laws, you don’t want to see how the art market is made. Or maybe you do.
By the end of the film, the biggest question is not about whether Marla has made the paintings alone, but whether the documentarian, Bar-Lev, will reveal to the family that he has his doubts. He so badly wants to believe, but he can’t get Marla making a painting from start to finish, and that missing footage becomes the magnetic black hole at the center of the movie. It’s the hole at the center of art, too—what exactly is in there, and why does it have such sway over us? When is it real, and when is it bullshit? What is it made of? Can it even be caught on film?
When the movie comes, watch it. It’s terrific.
