If you have ever spent £40 (US$51.53) and a whole weekend trying to paint out the scrawling of your young children from your rental walls in the futile hope that this will save your £1,300 deposit, you may greet the following news as I did: with a noise somewhere between a hot-water bottle being emptied and a cry of pain.
A Bavarian toddler, known already within the art world as Laurent Schwarz, has reportedly just landed himself a hefty brand deal with the German paint manufacturer Relius to create a range of colors, and another, separate deal with a wallpaper company — worth, presumably, thousands — all inspired by his own artwork.
Some of Laurent’s acrylic paintings have sold for more than £5,000, with his mother, Lisa, promising that every penny goes into a savings account. Dubbed the “pint-sized Picasso,” Schwarz is said to have a waiting list of hundreds of potential buyers, and has already exhibited his first solo show.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
The story, of course, raises those age-old questions about aesthetics: What divides true art from simple decoration? Is there such a thing as talent, or is it all just a matter of interpretation? Who owns a work of art and who has the agency of its creation? It also forces searing recognition of the sheer state of wealth inequality in modern society.
At a time when, according to the German federal statistical office, Statisches Bundesamt, just over 17.3 million people in Germany — about 20.9 percent of the population — are living in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion, there is still plenty of money, it seems, among those who have it, to spend on lovely things like paintings and interior decor.
It is all too easy to be snide about the art world; the astronomical sums of money involved, the Hollywood investors, the commodification of creativity and the rumbling feeling of emperor’s new clothes that can hum through the shoes of even the most committed art fan as they stand in a warehouse looking at a pile of apple cores, fiberglass offcuts and a dirty teaspoon labeled in the installation copy as The Crushing Sense of the End of the World, and retailing at £75,000.
However, sniggering at art is neither new nor particularly interesting. What is compelling, in my experience, is to witness the innate desire for mark-making, for building shrines and sculptures, the appetite for color and texture that seems to exist in all small children. I cannot call it universal, of course, just as I cannot claim that a hunger for milk or desire for human touch is universal, but our intense pleasure in art does seem common and even central to a collective human experience.
One gray and windswept day in yet another inner-city playground that felt like a filming location for a Soviet-era disaster film, I sat in a fox-smelling sand pit and watched my 14-month-old son spend at least 40 minutes slowly and methodically arranging a pile of leaves into a fan shape around a central mound. Another happy Tuesday, I spent about an hour wishing I was in bed, while he very deliberately placed empty snail shells, stones and pieces of twig on the stumps of a coppiced tree. Even at the time, through the haze of sleep deprivation and swollen breasts, I remember thinking about the inlays and mantels in Skara Brae; about the bone carvings and amulets found in peat bogs; about the altars in ancient Egypt and how, even 5,000 years ago, when most people were living on the hardest edge of basic subsistence, we still had the urge to create art, to display our mark-making and revere certain objects above others.
I am not, personally, a fan of creating “brands” around children. I chose long ago to keep images of my son off social media as much as possible and to keep any mention of him in my writing fairly vague and anonymous. The idea of promoting his paintings on a devoted Instagram page and touting his name for brand deals before he turned three did not appeal. I felt guilty enough just writing a memoir.
However, I do recognize and appreciate that the urge to create things — sometimes genuinely beautiful things — can be as strong in children as among any group of art school graduates. It would just be lovely to have a culture and politics that recognized the innate value of that, of making and expression for its own sake, rather than simply as a way to add to the economy. As a contributor to the “market.” Or as part of a “deal.”
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not