Letters to the Editor
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Collaboration
Having enjoyed and studied fine arts for more years than I want to mention, it is clear to me the aesthetics behind the paintings are adult and demonstrate an adult understanding of abstract expressionism.
The most likely scenario is that the paintings are a colloboration between Marla and her Dad. Dad provides the canvas scale and proportion, prechosen or premixed paints of a color harmony or theme, directs Marla, providing/limiting colors as needed, and determines when paintings are complete, perhaps making adjustments himself as needed to "bring the painting together". Marla provides expressive brushstrokes, other playful exhuberance and natural talent with paint.
The video proof on her site is labeled in a misleading way, they are labeled start-to-finish, but are not, they are heavliy edited and not even to finish. The site states that Marla graduated from small paper pads to large canvases. How? When she was three years old did she suddenly say, "Dad, I need a professionally prepared 4 x 6 foot canvas?"
Since a four year old girl is involved people are blinded to the obvious. It is unfortunate the way this has evolved. This could have evolved alot more honestly and perhaps as successfully if it was presented as a colloboration between father and daughter.
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I agree
Sajwan's scenario makes a lot of sense to me. I have a five year old son who is creative beyond my wildest dreams. We sometimes do collages together. I'll cut out the materials that I want him to use, give him the ground and basically do the "production work". I let him do the composition. To say these are his works would be very disingenuous. To say they are my works would also be inaccurate. One of the things that makes them interesting and different is that they are a combination of the two.
The thought that a four or five year old could go through the painstaking (and boring) process of being a real painter: preparing a ground, choosing the colors, building the layers of paint, controlling the textures, composing a work on a large scale, etc. seems preposterous to me. This girl obviously possesses creativity. Most four year olds do. She is probably that one out of a hundred that both possesses creativity and loves drawing and painting to such an extent that she is also willing to do it for pretty long stretches. But she is getting lots of help. Also, where are her drawings? Creative kids (and most adults, too) start out drawing. That's where their ideas and obsessions take form, not in paint. The lack of sketches and common themes/obsessions among the works is really the tip-off that these aren't the real thing.
One thing is for sure: as a four year old, she did not care about selling her art. I think her parents have done her a great disservice by thrusting her into celebrity. They are depriving her of the pure joy and freedom that only comes along once in a lifetime. They should come clean on just exactly what role they have played in her art and release her from the indentured servitude of having to produce marketable pieces. Stop selling her work. If you really believe in her, then save the pieces until she is an adult. If she is truly an artistic genius, they will be priceless, even though they were collaborations.
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a couple of things I should add
Interesting discussion, thanks to all readers.
I neglected to mention Elizabeth Cohen of the Binghamton daily paper, the Press and News-Bulletin, who wrote the first piece about Marla and serves as the conscience of the film, challenging Bar-Lev at several points about what he is doing and whether it might be better to walk away. Of course, she can't help herself either; she wrote another article this week (about the movie and her role in it).
Secondly, I think it's very interesting to ask -- as several of you have -- how the art would have been received if it had been presented from the beginning as a collaboration between Mark and Marla Olmstead. The funny thing here is that the postmodernist art establishment, exactly the institution that Marla's success supposedly "exposes," in some people's eyes, might have been open to that. Collaboration is very big these days, and the whole idea of a solitary artist producing great work more or less ex nihilo is sort of a relic of the past.
On the other hand, would the mainstream media have been interested, along with the kinds of middle-American collectors who saw Marla as embodying some kind of pure and innocent spirituality and drove up her prices to ludicrous levels? I doubt it. (It's important to understand that it *wasn't* the New York gallery world that embraced Marla, but an entirely different demographic.)
In any case, *if* the story is that Mark "helped" Marla extensively, as seems plausible, it isn't that fact that got the family into this predicament. It's their insistence on a somewhat old-fashioned mythology of what an artist is and how s/he works.
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Frank Stella could paint that
About 20 years ago Frank Stella showed up at the MoMA and noted that one of his works, which had been there for many years, had in fact been hung upside down.
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teachers see it
Especially high school teachers. We see this all the time, though it rarely makes the news. The complex chemistry of competing desires that plays out in classrooms sounds like the minor league version of the Olmsteads, without the complicating factors of publicity and money.
The teacher is the journalist.
Kids represent things to their parents, parents attempt to prepare and propel their kids into school; kids have to go to school alone, and once out of the house their motivations are affected by various forces, and there is a very clearly quantifiable result: a grade, a reputation, a position, a college. Under the right circumstances the kids and the parents conspire to create a subconscious (usually) combination that, after a while, becomes weird and maybe even pathological. Often they cheat, lie, and steal. The teacher is perfectly positioned to see it happen, just as you journalists are. Blow the whistle, and you often get the same reaction writ small.
Parents write their kids' papers; they go too far in helping; they lobby or cajole or threaten teachers, administrators, coaches. Parents warn teachers that their sons or daughters are "fragile", code for "take it easy on them." They pepper teachesr with e-mails and phone calls and conference requests. They berate their kids in public, punish them, ground them. They intercede inappropriately in their social or academic lives. They press for special accommodations in order to alibi weakness or simply get around the kids' resistance to high standards or long hours. They sue school systems over unsatisfactory results. Parents appeal suspensions for normal childhood transgressions caught red-handed. Parents ignore evidence of dangerous behavior. They don't let kids be kids, and they don't let kids make mistakes, make progress, make their own way. I had a parent react to a bad grade on a paper recently (even though the paper could be revised for a higher grade) by saying, "But we worked hard on that!" Without a trace of irony or hesitation.
Kids meanwhile fail on purpose; pierce or tattoo themselves; get drunk, pregnant, and STD's; become different people at school; and otherwise rebel in subtle ways against the limitations that parents establish. The result is a greater divergence between the parent and child, and more energy poured into the pathology.
Hence the minister's daughter becomes the town pump; the law-and-order president's kids run wild; the intellectual's kid flunks algebra and the cop's kid is a bully. Stereotypes all, with a basis in fact.
I tend to react to these tangled ugly scenarios with surprising flexibility and calm, not because I'm lazy or intimidated but because I can understand how they arise. They are in my experience temporary--11th grade is where the break comes when the kids become self-determined. (They may lead on to other problems, I suppose.) The parents are seldom consciously corrupting or steering their kids; they've just evolved to this point because of the competing calculus of culture, worry, history, habit, stress, embarassment, and ambition. And in seeing those extreme cases play out I've come to see the forces of my own family and my own children more clearly. I have a saying: the apple doesn't fall far from the horse. But is it intentional? Is it premeditated, understood, planned? I don't think it's even conscious.
ice