Is That a Picasso on Your Fridge? Kids' "Masterpieces" Critiqued by an "Art Expert"

Kids Create Them. Parents Submit Them. An Art Critic Reviews Them. And Don’t Think For One Second He Doesn’t Know Exactly What the Hell He's Talking About! Age can’t constrain greatness. Mozart composed at five. Picasso was painting at seven. If one doubts that young children reveal signs of genius every time they touch crayon to paper, just ask any parent about the artwork on their refrigerator door. But regular people don’t understand “art,” so it is impossible for them to see the difference between the work of an idiot savant and a kid who's just an idiot. In this book with its 60 color images of real kids’ artwork, New York art critic Salvatore Consiglio separate the wheat from the chaff in the field of children’s art. Consiglio’s review of one up-and-coming artist illustrates why identifying genius can't be left to parents. To the untrained eye, the painting appears as rows of watercolor polka dots in random colors, but Consiglio sees more: “The artist’s gorgeous symmetry conceals blooming buds of chaos. The artist displays an otherworldly grasp on this simple human condition: Repetition does not remove opportunity, it creates it.” Not afraid to call it as he sees it, Consiglio is brutally honest to any young artists who submitted “derivative” or “uninspired” work for this book—telling them straight out if it is time to hang up the Magic Markers. When the paint has dried, Is That a Picasso on Your Fridge? emerges as a bitingly hilarious parody of parents’ love for their kids’ scribbles and art critics’ adoration of their own narcissistic opinions.

Salvatore Consiglio is the art world nom de plume of Dan Consiglio, an advertising writer, film maker and author of The New Dad from A to Z. He is also the founder of the What My Kids Art Says blog.