IIf you’ve ever spent £40 and a weekend painting your young children’s scribbles off the walls of your rented flat in the vain hope of saving on your £1,300 security deposit, you’ll probably greet the following news in the same way I did: with a sound somewhere between the emptying of a hot water bottle and a scream of pain.

A Bavarian toddler, already known in the art world as Laurent Schwarz, has reportedly just signed a lavish trademark deal with German paint manufacturer Relius to create a color palette, as well as another, separate deal with a wallpaper manufacturer — believed to be worth several thousand dollars — 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 would go into a savings account. Schwarz, dubbed a “little Picasso”, is said to have a waiting list of hundreds of potential buyers and has already held his first solo exhibition.

The story, of course, raises the age-old questions about aesthetics: what distinguishes true art from mere 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 power to create it? It also forces us to a painful realization of the extent of wealth inequality in modern society. At a time when, according to the Federal Statistical Office, just over 17.3 million people in Germany—about 20.9 percent of the population—live in poverty and social exclusion or are at risk of poverty and social exclusion, there still seems to be enough money among those who have it to spend on nice things like paintings and interior design.

It is all too easy to mock the world of art; the astronomical sums of money involved, the Hollywood investors, the commercialisation of creativity and the oppressive feeling of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ that can throb in the shoes of even the most diehard art fan as they stand in a warehouse looking at a pile of apple cores, fibreglass scraps and a dirty teaspoon, labelled on the installation copy as ‘The Crushing Sense of the End of the World’ and retailing for £75,000.

But giggling about art is neither new nor particularly interesting. What Is What is compelling in my experience is the innate desire to make marks, to build shrines and sculptures, the appetite for colour and texture that seems to be present in all young children. I cannot, of course, say that this is universal, any more than I can claim that the hunger for milk or the desire for human touch is universal, but our intense joy in art seems to be common and even central to a collective human experience.

On one grey, windy day, in an inner-city playground that felt like the set of a Soviet-era disaster movie, I sat in a fox-smelling sandpit and watched my 14-month-old son spend at least 40 minutes slowly and methodically arranging a pile of leaves in a fan shape around a central mound. On another happy Tuesday, I spent an hour or so wishing I was in bed while he quite deliberately placed empty snail shells, stones and bits of twig on the stumps of a coppice tree. Even then, dazed by sleep deprivation and swollen breasts, I thought of the intarsia and mantelpieces at Skara Brae, of 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 edge of subsistence, we still felt the urge to create art, to display our signs and to venerate certain objects more than others.

Personally, I’m not a fan of creating “brands” around children. I decided long ago to keep pictures of my son off social media as much as possible, and to keep any mention of him in my writing fairly vague and anonymous. I didn’t like the idea of ​​promoting his pictures on his own Instagram page and touting his name for brand deals before he turned three. I felt guilty enough just writing my memoir. But I recognize and appreciate that the drive to create things – sometimes really beautiful things – can be just as strong in children as it is in any group of art school graduates. It would just be nice to have a culture and politics that recognized the innate value of this, of creating and expressing yourself for its own sake, rather than just as a way to contribute to the economy. As a contribution 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