Thierry Guetta Is Like Marla Olmstead (Except Not As Cute)

If you have kids or you're interested in modern art, then you should watch the documentary My Kid Could Paint That -- it's about a precocious four-year-old abstract painter named Marla Olmstead; the film investigates what defines art as much as the mystery of whether Marla painted her paintings or not-- but now there is a new documentary on the same theme and it is even better . . . it's called Exit Through the Gift Shop and it is ostensibly about documenting street art-- the obsessive Frenchman Thierry Guetta devotes his life to filming these ambitious and talented vandals on their midnight missions to make odd, skillful, often beautiful and essentially disposable art, but like all great documentaries (Capturing the Friedmans, Street Fight, Mr. Death, etc.) the film takes an unpredictable turn . . . Thierry Guetta transforms into "Mr. Brainwash" and the theme moves from the aesthetic to the absurd . . . I won't spoil it, but things might not be exactly what they seem . . . I'm giving it ten spray cans out of ten and I think Banksy-- the faceless and heralded street artist who directed-- will win an Oscar.

The Anecdote of the Jar

No one wants to hear parents bragging about their kids, so I'll make this quick and then get to the conspiracy theories: my six year old son Ian used pastels to draw the clay jar pictured above while he was at his art class; the shading is first rate, and his teacher was so impressed that she put a picture of it on her web page . . . and my first reaction when Ian brought this piece home was: "You didn't make that!" and Sentence of Dave has investigated artistic manipulation enough that I at least have to entertain the idea that Ian didn't produce this very competent still-life . . . but then who did? . . . at first I suspected his art teacher Jill, and that made sense, because if we perceived her as an excellent teacher, then we would keep sending Ian back to her for lessons, but, unlike Marla Olmstead, Ian will produce quality art in front of anyone (and also, unlike Marla Olmstead, you can usually tell what it is he has produced) and so the hoax must be more sinister . . . I am guessing that Banksy is posing as my six year old son-- his ultimate piece of performance art-- and meanwhile my actual son roams the earth with his mentor Mr. Brainwash, doing graffiti art, and eventually they will reveal the swap and bask in the glory of media fame . . . and the price of both Banksy and Ian's art will sky-rocket.

Emphasis is Everything

The documentary My Kid Could Paint That is about a precocious four year old abstract painter named Marla Olmstead-- and there are two ways to interpret the title: My Kid Could Paint That or My Kid Could Paint That . . . and that makes all the difference.

Who Cares? Not Tom Ripley. Not Banksy. You.

The talented Tom Ripley is at it again in Ripley Under Ground, the second book in Patricia Highsmith's "Ripliad" series-- this time his victim is an unlucky art patron named Thomas Murchison, who rightly suspects that the painting he has bought is a forgery-- unfortunately he has stumbled into one of Tom Ripley's sophisticated con games-- and because he can't adopt Ripley's amorality, he ends up a corpse, but Highsmith has bigger fish to fry than just murder: Ripley asks Murchison, "Why disturb a forger who's doing such good work?" and this raises one of my favorite artistic/philosophical debates, which is portrayed in both the documentary My Kid Could Paint That and Banksy's perplexing film Exit Through The Gift Shop . . if there is any way to objectively judge art, then it shouldn't matter who painted the picture-- if it's good, then it's good-- but, of course, our brains don't work like that; art buyers want to be sure that it is prodigy Marla Olmstead that painted the canvases they spent so much money on, not her dad, and when Oprah revealed that James Frey's "memoir" A Million Little Pieces is actually part fictional, people were outraged-- including me!-- and so I suppose I should come clean here and reveal that Sentence of Dave is actually written by a trained donkey, not a computer program . . . but I'm sure you all suspected that from the start.

All Searches Lead to the Sentence of Dave

Here are some of the Google search entries that led people to this humble little corner of the internet: emo, giant wasps, japanese emo, testicular elephantitis, gay roller blade hockey, elephantitis face, child safety, punch a colleague, large swine pig, DAVE IN BACKYARD MONSTER, a pig dick, bubble, awkward dave, marla olmstead now, alan moore banksy, eddie izzard, orfanato, fish and fin sentence, emo light bulb, and bubbles making . . . and being the "go to" sight for these obscure topics makes me very proud, but not as proud as cornering the market on the phrase "residual glee."

Confessions of a Lazy Man

I've finally gotten my new printer/scanner hooked up (check out my six year old son Ian's abstract art-- he could give Marla Olmstead a run for her money) but that wasn't the only package from Amazon that I received that day-- there was another one, a smaller one, and I figured it contained a book or two, but I didn't get around to opening it for a few days and when I did, I found two books inside, neither of which I ordered: An Eyewitness Guide to Spain and a history of Shea Stadium . . . so I looked at the outside of the package, and it wasn't addressed to me, it belonged to the house several doors down, and so I put the package on top of the scanner, informed my wife of this, and went on with my life . . . two weeks later my wife noticed that I never returned the package to the rightful owners and she chastised me (and I didn't tell her what I was thinking: I figured you would return it . . . smart move on my part) and she told me I needed to walk it over to the neighbors immediately, so I took the dog for protection-- because I figured this was going to be embarassing, since I had opened the package and then neglected to return it to them in a timely fashion, and I was hoping Sirius would drag me to safety if things got to awkward (or at least dispel the awkwardness with his powers of cuteness) but luckily no one was home . . . which means they were probably wandering through Spain without a guidebook.