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

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