Dan Crowe, an art school grad turned author and editor, is providing some well-off parents with the greatest gift of all: vaguely tongue-in-cheek but suitable-for-framing critical essays analyzing their child's paintings of ponies written in a high-falutin MoMA exhibition catalog style. All for a little more than $250/pop ($380 w/ "good quality frame"). Among the celebrities who've had their tykes' work evaluated are Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and one of the guys from Blur that's not Damon Albarn or Graham Coxon. The service is called "Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service," after Charles Kinbote—the increasingly insane academic who unreliably annotates Nabokov's Pale Fire—in a little joke drenched with so much precious fuckwittery that the whole enterprise could only have come from England.

Crowe would like to dispel the ideas that his Vanity Criticism enterprise is a) a po-mo art prank joke, b) making fun of the kids or c) A Sad Commentary On The State of Our Culture and the Vanity of the Rich but it really does seem to be all of those things, and more.

Or as he puts it: "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."

Here is an excerpt from his essay on the painting reproduced above:

It is tempting to interpret Isabel Rosen's work, particularly that from her recent blue period, exclusively as abstract art, but this would be wrong. In fact it would be rude. Certainly a painting like Important Items in the Sky, 2007, (right) shares a surface similarity with Miró's later abstract works. But while Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry, Rosen adapts from the world around her, using ready made materials from her every day life. In the work we see a My Little Pony, and realize immediately that Rosen shares Plato's understanding of the ideal society. In this sense Rosen has more in common with Picasso than with Miró, but it must be emphasized that neither Picasso nor Miró possessed Rosen's sparkling pallet, or had a range of stickers anywhere near what we see here.

So there you have it, absolutely no kid-mocking or art pranking or metaphoring for all the money burning a hole in our culture.

Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service
Is this a Matisse? Er, no, it's Mattie's [Times of London]