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"Dinosaur" by 4-year-old Marla Olmstead
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: October 4, 2004
Latest Update: October 4, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Backup of Which Was Painted by a Child?This backup copy is to be used only if the original site on the Web is not accessible. It is meant to preserve the document for teaching purposes, when sometimes the URLS are changed when sites are updated, or sites are eliminated. Please be certain to give credit if you refer to this to the original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/weekinreview/03kimm.html. Original URL, consulted: October 4, 2004.
Photo by Jean-Yves Trocaz/PMVP,
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company"Abstract Picture (648-2)" by Gerhard Richter
October 3, 2004
Which Was Painted by a Child?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN4-YEAR-OLD in Binghamton, N.Y., whose splattery paintings have been selling for $6,000, is the latest child to raise the question: What is art?
The painter is Marla Olmstead. Her preferred medium is acrylic on canvas. She gives titles like "Dinosaur" to cheerful smears of blue and red with dark squiggles on top. Her break came at 3 when a family friend hung her art in a local coffee shop. Now collectors are lapping it up.
The art market operates according its own logic. In truth, all art by children looks great when it isn't olive drab. Modern art has accustomed us to appreciate untutored spontaneity and blithe enthusiasm. That enthusiasm can lead most children to mix too many colors and end up with mud. The child who, by intuition or instruction, knows when to stop looks like a genius.
But prodigy is a label without real meaning, ultimately. How young do you have to be? How good? Who's to say? Abstract art amplifies the confusion.
The crack that somebody's child could have made a Jackson Pollock entirely misses the point of what Pollock was about - which was to upend modern painting - but it stumbles onto the essential mystery of formal eloquence: abstraction can be meaningful and look beautiful for reasons that have nothing to do with whether a dinosaur resembles a dinosaur.
Its ambiguity is a rich subject for heady painters today like Gerhard Richter, who switch-hits between realism and abstraction, in the process asking whether abstractions say anything at all.
A 4-year-old's costly daubings suggest that they do. They tell us innocence is priceless.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
