As Lance said when sending me this article, "what is there to say, really?"
Well, a couple of salty phrases involving the high arts community, PT Barnum, and the old proverb about fools, their money, and parting, but this is a family-oriented article about a 4 year old girl, so I'll refrain.
Money quote #1:
In the beginning, her parents said, people bought her work without knowing her age. Then customers bought it because of her age. Some say she is a prodigy. Some say she is just
playing.
And some people are reminded of the artsy family in Beetlejuice, except that there will be no Harry Belafonte-themed payoff for the audience...
Money quote #2:
Mr. Brunelli is a painter whose photorealistic works are displayed in SoHo. He was drawn to Marla's work. He and his friend stared at it like children staring at clouds, seeing flamenco dancers and their vivid movements on the canvas.
Then the friend told him the artist was a toddler.
Hee. More power to Marla and her folks. And read the whole article--I have a feeling the reporter is in on the joke...
Posted by Big Arm Woman at September 28, 2004 10:14 AMRemember the people who put down art saying "My kid could do better than this"? And were put down in their turn by artists and aficionados? Now they've been proved right! Sweet.
Posted by: Jim C. at September 28, 2004 10:35 PMThis is so embarassing, but I have to say that Marla's work does look better than most abstract art I've seen. The "Asian Sun" doesn't do anything for me, but "Dinosaur" is somewhat interesting and the "Ornaments" behind her looks cool.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at September 28, 2004 10:53 PMSorry to double post, but I remembered something as I hit the button. Ten years or so back, there was this 60 Minutes special (haha, but I'm sure it was accurate) about an artist. The claim was that his students / associates painted the works for him. The artist didn't quite admit that, but did say that he sketched out the concepts and let others execute them. Perhaps I'm just a hick, but I couldn't get my head around why 60M thought this was an issue. One of the buyers couldn't either. 60M interviewed him and badgered him about how the artist might not have painted it. The guy simply didn't get it - he kept repeating "I really like it. It speaks to me." And I thought "OK, the guy likes it, so he bought it. That makes sense to me." Yet the 60M couldn't understand why the buyer didn't care who painted it. It just seemed so sad that the 60M guy had lost the ability to appreciate art instead of provenance.
Anyway, this reminds me of that. Either you like the paintings, or you don't, and whether they were painted by a four year old seems very secondary.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at September 28, 2004 11:00 PMAOG, spot-on. There was a case just like that in classical music: Giacinto Scelsi turned out to have done "schemata" for a lot of his late music and let students fill in the actual, um, notes. And apart from the genuine question of whether Scelsi was receiving fame (and money) that properly belonged to his students, the piece that resulted is still a piece, right? One that you could hear and like, or not.
There are cases like that in music all the time. There's a pile of music once attributed to Bach that became suddenly less popular once it was de-authenticated. Same music, suddenly less saleable.
Posted by: Michelle Dulak at September 29, 2004 01:26 PM