What is Art?

It's a question that has been posed time and again. Particularly in this age of post-modernism, where it seems that the things that show up in museums and galleries have more to do with thumbing one's nose at the audience than engaging them, it is more pertinent than ever. It's been asked about Pollock's splatters of paint, Warhol's Brillo boxes, Cy Twombly's scribbles, and today the discussion is even more complicated. Is something art just because someone says it's art? Normally the debate is centered on the cultural and intellectual value. It's often a high minded sparring match between critics, artists, collectors and the like, often leaving the general public feeling alienated by the very thing that is designed to communicate with us and touch our souls. So what happens when all of this vaunted rhetoric of the art world gets turned on its head by someone who has no interest or comprehension of what the argument is even about? What if that person is not able to have a voice in this discussion, not because they are too small in terms of fame and clout, but rather too small in terms of age and attention span. Enter 4 year old Marla Olmstead, world famous painter from Binghamton, NY.

You may have heard of her. She's made the national talk show circuit and been featured on countless news programs from the nightly news to 60 Minutes. Her paintings have sold for $20,000 and up, and she's had a feature length documentary made about her. That documentary, aptly titled My Kid Could Paint That, started like most of the hoopla surrounding this apparent prodigy, out of fascination and curiosity. And like much of that attention, at some point it turned to skepticism and suspicion.

The paintings at the center of what turned from celebration to controversy are far from what one might expect out of a preschooler. They're fairly large canvases filled with abstract imagery, broad palates of striking color and a certain sophistication that belies the age of the maker. As one critic pointed out, they could easily be slipped into a collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and not seem out of place. I wouldn't disagree. They're beautiful and elegant on a number of levels. They're at times playful, but not in the same way that a typical toddlers finger paintings might be. And that is where the controversy comes alive. Could a 4 or 5 year old really be capable of doing this work on her own, or did she have help? Is she a genius, or a cleverly built fraud? These are some of the questions the film attempts to answer.

The director Amir Bar-Lev actually didn't set out to tackle these questions, not originally anyway. Rather he began with a genuine interest in the story, like so many. But as the doubts of the painting's authenticity mounted in their volume and intensity, Bar-Lev himself began to doubt as he never had before. And so he was faced with a dilemma. Continue to make the film that he had set out to make, which he no longer really believed in, or at least was not as sure of, or bring the questions to the surface and risk losing the trust of the people who had welcomed him so graciously into their lives. It's a challenge for anyone making a documentary, to gain our subject's trust, but to not become too involved and risk losing some of our objectivity.

In the end, it's an open question as to whether or not Marla's paintings are authentic. The parents go to great pains to convince the world that they aren't phonies. They videotape her making paintings from start to finish, but even then there are those who say the new paintings lack the quality of earlier ones. Caught in the middle of all this is young Marla, who at least appears to be oblivious. She seems like a normal kid. We see her painting in the film and at times she seems to be making a mess, and at other times she displays certain technique and intensity that suggests a greater than average ability and knowledge. While its hard to imagine there wasn't some input from her parents, it's hard to say whether it was in the form of telling her specific things to paint or simply coming up with the titles or a statement for the work, or perhaps just coaching her as any supportive parent does whether it's their child at baseball practice or dance class.

And then there's the whole issue of meaning and intention behind the work. If a child can make this work and has no particular agenda or grand notion in mind, does it dilute the work of more serious artists who go to great pains to develop their work and stress the conceptual nature and meaning behind the work? I don't think it does. I believe that art is not about who made the work or even what they necessarily wanted their audience to get out of it. It has more to do with what we as viewers acutally get out of the work. We bring our own experiences to it and if it is thought provoking or brings certain emotions to the surface, that is in my mind what art is about. If someone is intentionally deceiving their audience to make a profit, that certainly would be troubling, and it's hard to say definitively if that is in fact going on. I'd certainly like to think that's not the case and what exists truly is a child with an incredible talent, and perhaps some parents who had good intentions, but allowed her to get too much exposure. Like any story, it's ultimately up to us to make up our own minds.