My daughter Mattie is a painter’s painter. It must be true because a critic
has deemed that her daubings are “highly sophisticated” and actually rather
Fauvist.
She shares Kandinsky’s painterly method, he says, and her work has a surface
likeness to Matisse, despite her early years (she’s 3). Perhaps I could
learn from the pushy couple in the film documentary which came out last
week, My Kid Could Paint That. Their seven-year-old, Marla Olmstead,
has been selling her paintings for $15,000 (£7,400) a canvas in the New York
market, never mind that there is now a question mark over their
authenticity. I’m thinking, clear the mortgage, book the Maldives for
January, and then there’s that Disney Princess dress she wants (well, she
did do all that brushwork).
In fact, however much I appreciate Mattie’s splodges, she is merely the victim
of a new craze: vanity criticism. You’ve heard of vanity publishing, where
writers who can’t get the big guns to advance them dosh pay hard cash to see
their names on the flabbiest of spines. Well this is the critical
equivalent.
Dan Crowe, former editor of the now-defunct literary magazine Zem-bla,
has set up a company, Kinbote’s Bespoke Art Commentary Service, in which he
is paid to make critical comments on the works of children barely out of
pull-ups. Parents e-mail him a j-peg of their child’s art work, the child
answers a series of questions (What is the painting of? What are her
aspirations? What does she like to do?). Crowe returns a mini-essay that
compliments and complements the picture.
It arrives beautifully printed, on lovely paper, clip-framed in a gift box
(£130) or in a “good quality” frame (£190). The idea is that it hangs on the
wall alongside the piece under scrutiny. The ideal age of his muses is 2½ to
6 years old (“When they start drawing nothing but My Little Ponies it gets
much more difficult”).
It sounds like an artworld prank. Surely he’s the next Turner Prize contestant
making a statement about the excesses of the cashmere-booties generation.
And, anyway, who would spend nearly £200 on what Crowe summarises as “crap”,
350-500 words of blether about a child’s scribblings.
Actually, Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and the Blur guitarist Alex James – and,
with luck, Johnny Depp’s child is next in the line for that guaranteed
five-star review. Crowe writes on the website: “Oh, you want to know if
‘well known’ people have used this service, as if celebrity is a keen
barometer for whether something is of quality? And, of course, to establish
if I am a lunatic or not? So be it.” He then lists its starry alumni.
But Crowe, 35, denies it is a spoof and insists that it has a top side of
humour with a serious underbelly. “These essays are not for kids. You try to
be funny but it is not appropriate to be sarcastic. I’m not taking the piss
out of the kids or out of Kandinsky,” he says. “It’s more like the gormless
humour of Steve Martin.”
Although the website was launched only this week, the idea came about in 2003
when Crowe, who lives in Shepherd’s Bush with his wife Lauren, had twins.
Zoë and Zachary started drawing and “Lau-ren suggested that I write a
pungent, pretentious, Goldsmith’s-inspired essay about them and I did
because I’m good at talking nonsense.” He says he also remembers overhearing
a parent mumbling at the White Cube Gallery: “My God! Is it possible that
Damien Hirst actually stole the idea of the dot paintings from our little
Jamie’s draw-ings?”
“Of course he didn’t”, Crowe says, “But it is a splendid thought.
“I’ve always liked doing silly projects – things that are real and aren’t
real,” he says. He has even forced a critique on his father’s Christmas
present this year, an old oil painting he picked up from a secondhand shop
entitled Windsor Castle. It shows a couple of Georgian gentlemen in
brightly coloured finery yet Crowe has given it his own personal twist.
“It’s quite rude,” he says coyly. “I’ve renamed it Mate
you look a real w***er in that pink Jacket,” he laughs.
The company’s ethos, Crowe explains, is a mixture of “silly and learned”. “It
is important to point out that I do know what I’m talking about when it
comes to art,” he insists. So: Crowe went to Goldsmith’s College of Art from
1992 to 1995, just missing Damien Hirst and the 1988 Freeze show brigade
(“although I know them all: Damien [Hirst], Gavin [Turk] and Tracey [Emin] .
. .”) where he studied under Hirst’s tutor, the artist Michael Craig-Martin.
“It was very concept-orientated. He taught me that you can do whatever you
want to do. There are no rules with fine art.”
But, having reached a degree of success as an artist of photo abstracts ( The
Daily Telegraph reviewed his graduation show as glowingly as one of his
own vanity crits) he decided that he wanted to be a writer and gave up his
studio. He did a year of Narrative Theory at Royal Holloway but left to
launch a literary magazine. He recently edited the book How I Write – the
Secret Lives of Authors (Rizzoli), is literary editor of Another
Magazine, which comes out twice a year, and writes for the LA Times
and Wallpaper.
He has something of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang inventor about him (for
every Chitty there’s a disastrous contraption which burns all your hair
off), plus brilliant connections and an easy charm that can distract you
from asking the obvious question: isn’t it rather cynical to analyse a naive
piece of art (however aesthetically pleasing) using adult criteria? At best,
it’s amusing for dinner-party chat. At worst the joke’s on the unknowing
child.
Crowe is well aware of the accusations and wants everyone to know that this is
not all he does with his life (“that would be weird, scary”). “People will
think of this as being too cynical,” he says. “But actually it’s just really
silly. There should be some fun in the world. People have always looked at
kids’ art and seen a unique order.
“Your daughter’s work is very complicated”, he says, to change the subject.
“And her complementary colour usage very sophisticated. Usually they [his
clients] paint definite things, she didn’t.
“The idea that it is actually getting to the crux of what their work is about
is ludicrous and if that was what I was selling then the world would have a
right to be angry. I think that a lot of people won’t get it – they will
think that it’s a metaphor for how much money there is at the moment.”
Yet clearly money and publicity are not to be sniffed at. We discuss the work
of Kate Moss’s five-year-old daughter Lila Grace and he says
matter-of-factly: “It would be great to get it on the website.” Perhaps he
is a businessman after all, although
he admits that he couldn’t charge the actress Tilda Swinton when he did her
twins and is “in general, shy about asking for money”.
He acknowledges, jokily, that separated parents could be more lucrative,
doubling the orders. Of Moss and Jefferson Hack’s child Lila Grace he says:
“She painted two paintings and each parent will have a critique of each.” In
fact, he reveals that one of the commentaries of Lila Grace’s work is Hack’s
Christmas present this year to his ex, Kate Moss. “It was great. Lila’s a
very good painter with a real sense of humour in her work. The work she did
was so good I wondered if Jefferson had done it himself,” Crowe says.
The critiques usually take about four hours. “[Lila’s] took seven hours. It
was more difficult because I hadn’t met her.”
His appraisals are usually, although not necessarily, upbeat. On Marla
Olmstead’s Ode to Pollock he gives a barbed response:
“Concerned with decoration, this painting is not really doing anything. It’s
nice, but meaningless.” Touché!
What if he sees something disturbing in a picture? He’s not a trained art
psychologist. He doesn’t answer the question but instead brings up a case of
a child of an extremely well-known client, whose name he asks me not to
write. “There was a picture in there which made me think that perhaps the
mother isn’t at home as much as she should be,” he says. He lets this issue
evaporate.
The company’s title is as pretentious as his notices. Kinbote is Crowe’s pen
name for this project. It is also a character in the Nabakov novel Pale
Fire, a Crowe favourite. “The book is a poem and it is clear that the
character Charles Kinbote’s commentary is delusional and that he is a very
unreliable narrator. I am making a comment on the unreliab-lilty of
commentary,” he claims.
Crowe says he doesn’t know whether to expect orders of five a month or 3,000.
“It depends on what the response is to this craziness.” His next plan is to
create bespoke short stories featuring real people specified by the client .
He may not have finished his MA in Narrative Theory but he has a Master in the
art of flattery: “Your daughter has no idea who Kandinsky is,” he says, “but
if you put her work next to it it’s interesting to think that she shares the
attributes with the 20th-century genius.” Quite.
‘Mathilda shares Kandinsky’s painterly method, but she’s responding to the
real world’: Crowe’s analysis
It is tempting to interpret Mathilda’s work, particularly that from her recent
Fauvist period, exclusively as abstract art, but this would be wrong. In
fact it would be offensive. Certainly a painting like Beach, 2007,
shares a surface similarity with Matisse’s early abstraction works. But
while Matisse drew on the contradictory relationships inherent in the colour
spectrum, Mathilda draws from the world around her, responding to actual,
real experiences. “What is the point of colour theory?” she seems to be
suggesting.
The forms of Mathilda’s paintings are organised against flat, neutral
background and are painted in a vast range of bright colours, especially
blue, orange, yellow, green, and purple. Only two other works of modern art
have featured such an extensive range of colours. Amorphous amoebic shapes
alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on
the background with seeming nonchalance, and we are reminded of Kandinsky’s
brushwork. But while Mathilda shares Kandinsky’s painterly method, she is
responding to the real world, her world, and not on some crazy spiritual art
trip.
There are also ecological tones to her work. We see a sky devoid of plane
emissions – clearly a statement on global warming. Yet all is not doom and
gloom. These dreamlike visions often have a whimsical or humorous quality:
there are oversized sea urchins evident and other tiny sea creatures. These
elements relax the spectator and allow a form of energised meditation.
Interlaced in an all-over configuration, with multiple focal points, the
painting generates even more energy; a continuum so charged that it seems to
expand beyond the picture limits, evoking an immediate sensation of
boundlessness, an endless space that is the Universe.
Mathilda’s success as an artist lies in her ability to evoke the big
questions. Where are we situated in the Universe? How many sea urchins can
one picture have?
What makes it necessary for blue and green to be placed next to each other
with such offhandedness? And what’s that big red thing in the middle? It is
these questions which only art can answer, and for which we have Mathilda to
thank for asking. Charles Kinbote, London, December 07
Win bespoke criticism for your child’s art
Does your child show signs of artistic genius? Does that scrawl pinned to the
fridge show flashes of Hockney? We are offering three lucky readers the
chance to have their offspring’s work criticised by Kinbote’s art service.
Send us an image of your child’s picture electronically (no postal entries
please) as a 300dpi j-peg – each should be no larger than 3mb – to childrenart@thetimes.co.uk;
closing date: Dec 27. (Note to parents – this should be the work of just
your children!)
Dan Crowe's website is www.kinbotescommentary.com
