Art Documentaries: Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?, My Kid Could Paint That

Here are two terrific art-related documentaries that are definitely worth checking out. (If you have Netflix, both are available as instant downloads.)

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? is about an older woman, a retired truck driver who lives in a trailer park and who spends her nights digging through dumpsters in search of hidden treasures. One day, she buys a painting at a thrift shop for $5 (she talks the owner down from $8). The painting is too large to fit in her trailer, so she props it up outside, and contemplates using it as a dartboard. Later a man knocks at her door. He explains that he teaches art history at a local college, and he spotted her painting as he was driving by, and that she might want to get it appraised, because it looks to him as if it might be a Jackson Pollock. The woman responds, “Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?” She spends the next decade researching art and trying to prove that her painting is a real Pollock, and in spite of steadily mounting evidence in her favor the art world refuses to validate her find, largely due, it seems, to snobbery. In particular there’s one art critic featured in the film who you almost can’t believe is a real person, because he seems like such a gross, over-the-top parody of a pretentious twit. Midway through the film someone offers to buy the painting for $2 million, but the woman turns them down. It’s worth at least $25 million, she declares, and she’s not going to get played for a sucker. By the end of the film she’s also turned down an offer for $10 million.

My Kid Could Paint That starts out as the heartwarming story of a normal, likeable family who discover one day that their four-year-old daughter can paint brilliant works of abstract expressionism that sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and the little girl soon attracts major media attention. But midway through the film, the story takes a plunge down the rabbit hole, when a 20/20 investigation suggests that the little girl isn’t doing the paintings by herself, and that her father is either directing her or retouching her work. The filmmaker, who has become close to the family, doesn’t know what to believe, and he gradually loses faith as his attempts to capture on film the little girl painting something exceptional prove fruitless. But in the end he’s still not sure, and man, neither am I. The owner of the gallery who first displayed the girl’s paintings talks about the frustration he feels as a photo-realist painter who spends months on a piece — deploying the most exacting technique — as he watches canvases that consist of nothing more than a few splashes of paint selling for millions of dollars, and his glee at being able to prove to the art world that even a four-year-old could do it. The question of whether this little girl is a scam or not is therefore set against the larger question of whether abstract expressionism itself is a scam.