She is a normal lively, energetic, and fascinating 4-year old. However, the art world perceives her as a child prodigy, a master painter on a par with Picasso. Her name is Marla Olmstead a young girl from Binghamton, N.Y., who has gotten a lot of publicity because at her age she is producing abstract paintings that are selling for hundreds and thousands of dollars, are placed in gallery shows, generate a firestorm in the art community, and are the subject of controversy. The documentary My Kid Could Paint That about Marla and her paintings is highly entertaining and it raises interesting questions about media exploitation, the value of art, and its authenticity. Just about every parent of a young child has a priceless collection of their masterpieces; treasured drawings and paintings taped to a closet door, stuck to the refrigerator with magnets or rolled up in a box somewhere in the basement. The value of these artifacts is personal and sentimental, but they can also have an aesthetic power that goes beyond parental pride. On the other hand in the case of young Marla her parents Mark and Laura as well as art critics, gallery owners, and the media have taken that pride farther than what is normal.
Some of the opening imagery in the documentary shows Marla sitting on the kitchen floor in her diaper with a paintbrush in hand, paint tubes spread around and a blank canvas below. This adorable girl who seems to be like any other young inquisitive, precocious child is having an enjoyable time painting touches the viewer’s heart. We watch in awe as she pours paint from the tubes and smears the paint with a brush. As we see Marla painting in her diaper or in her jumper the director of the video appeals to our emotions by showing Marla, in my opinion just like any other young child painting. I think this was a very effective way to appeal to us to show the viewer that Marla is just like any other 4-year-old painting a picture. Other instances where the video appeals to our emotions and where you can see Marla as a regular girl and not this “prodigy” that she is being presented as is when her father asks her if she wants to paint, Marla says “no.” However, Marla’s dad pushes her to paint. The viewer can see that she just does not want to paint; she is a young child that has no interest in it at the time. The documentary does a very good job at calling to attention the emotional appeals of Marla as just a young child.
Are the painting of Marla’s “real” art, that there is a sense of composition and creation and not just the work of a girl who likes to paint putting down colors where she wants, making movements with the brush how she wants? When speaking of ethics (ethos) who is one to decide if these works are to be displayed along with modernists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Marc? Is it up to the art critics who criticize art in the context of aesthetics or beauty? Art critics know art they have studied what it is about and how it is created. However, in the case of Marla, is she not just a little girl that enjoys painting? Marla’s parents describe her work and how it all started. So in a sense they are the ones who have the ethics to determine if Marla is a true artist. I believe it is up to the people who know art well, who have studied it and who also know Marla and how she paints to determine such things. Others may have varied views about Marla’s creations but ultimately it is up to the ones who know art and Marla.
The film also discusses numbers whether it is in the number of painting she has done, sold or in the price that her paintings are sold for. Marla’s paintings are selling for anything between seven and fifteen thousand dollars, prices at which “real” art is sold. At one gallery in particular Marla had a sell out show and she already has seventy more painting lined up to do for interested buyers. It maybe that numbers should be taken into consideration when determining if something is art.
If one were to look at Marla’s paintings and not know she was a four-year-old girl they probably would think that her work is on a par of Picasso and other artist. The untaught sense of color and composition that Marla seems to possess sometimes gives extraordinary results. Except that these magical finger-paint daubings and crayon scribblings are not really works of art in any consistent sense of the term, but rather the consequence of play, the blissfully unaware sentiment from a little girl named Marla from Binghamton, N.Y.
Analysis of Film
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