Review of My Kid Could Paint That (2007) by Riley H — 31 Jul 2010

This is a good film. It doesn't go everywhere I would like it to (I would really like to know if the parents are actually going to give this girl her money) but it's got great ambiguity to it. The question I want to is, if this man did indeed help his child to paint these paintings, is it really fraud? People ostensibly bought these paintings because they were good.

Does it matter how the artist is/was or if it was more than one person? If it is fraud, as some suggest, then it is fraud because the buyers were buying these paintings because they were done by a four year old, which I'm sure they would have downright denied earlier.

Nobody will ever know, unless Marla or her father admit it. I agree, the filmed ones look worse than the earliest ones, but we are measuring these against standards Marla isn't even aware of. If Marla did indeed paint all of these paintings with little help, there's no way of ascertaining the why of the apparent change in style, as she was a little girl.

We may just see adult things in these paintings because we want to. Who knows? That's why it's a good movie.