8-Year-Old Artist, “Mini Monet,” Better Than You

Just when you thought the art world could not be any more absurd –– $1.5 million for a Richard Tuttle?! –– along comes the news that an 8-year-old British boy has sold in excess of $200,000 of his paintings. Kieron Williamson does scenic watercolors, and while his technique isn’t bad, it’s not exceptional either, definitely not a-few-thou-per-piece exceptional. Clearly, a majority of the people who plopped down their hard-earned money on the kid’s stuff, you can bet, are speculators, betting that he will continue producing art, better art, allowing them to say that they possess some of his earliest known work. (Earliest known works, however, are not always an artist’s most valuable.)

The exhibit at a gallery in Norfolk consisted of 33 paintings and sold out within 30 minutes, and evidently there’s a waiting list for Williamson’s work that’s about 700-people long. We all know that of all of the arts, the visual arts are heavily biography-driven. Most people can’t tell the difference between a de Kooning and a sixth-grader’s fingerpaintings, which means that people who (allegedly) can –– members of the dreaded art-world establishment –– must serve as intermediates. And “intermediate” is just another word for “gatekeeper,” keeping out the riff-raff and keeping in the people who attended the right MFA programs and/or kissed the right rings, talent be damned. (What else explains that starfucking hack Elizabeth Peyton?) An 8-year-old boy with some painterly talent is nothing but biography and just more of the same old, same old art-world story. Until an old man posing as an 8-year-old blind painter comes along anyway.

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