Watched this documentary a few days ago. It's a solid doc that raises questions on art that I have often dealt with.
Unfortunately, the central question of the film seems to be did or did not the 4 year old girl, Marla Olmstead, the film is about paint the paintings claimed to be hers. The real question, though, is why is such manifestly dreadful art even being paid attention to.
The idiocy of the arts world- from New York Times arts apologist Michael Kimmelman to a stolid photo-realist painter to WASPy dilettantes suckered into purchasing garbage for thousands of dollars- has rarely been better portrayed, although director Amir Bar-Lev's position on the obvious fraud- artistic and financial, should have been much clearer and decisive, since it is so utterly without meaning. My favorite moment in the film is when a deluded wannabe art patron looks at a glop of painting on a canvas and starts developing a whole Freudian analysis of what the glops portray even though this is all clearly in his febrile mind.
Here's the trailer:
I'll have a full review online in the near future, but the parents of this child deserve to be imprisoned for their fraud and abuse of their child's youth. Other than that, if anyone still claims that, after this film, and the magnificent Orson Welles film F For Fake, that Abstract Expressionism is not a con, then they are either liars, stupid, psychotics, or con men.
