They Don’t Make My-Child-Might-Be-A-World-Class-Artist Bumper Stickers.
In the last century, art has become increasingly difficult to judge and classify. Long extinct are the days when the best artist was the one who could paint the most realistic bowl of fruit or recreate a perfect look in someone’s eye.
Naturally as art has become more difficult to judge, it has become easier to criticize, to say, that’s not art! A monkey could paint that. My four-year-old could paint that. And that’s just what happened to the Olmsteads.
My Kid Could Paint That, the forthcoming documentary from Amir Bar-Lev introduces (or reintroduces) the world to Marla Olmstead.
“The ‘Lottery Ticket’ nature of the story was interesting,” Bar-Lev said in an interview. “The story that went out, which I think was just as compelling to people as the paintings was, was: Little girl paints. Family friends come by the house and admire work. Parents shrug. ‘But doesn’t every parent like their child’s artwork?’ Friends say, ‘no this is objectively good.’ Parents, on a whim, agree to exhibit child’s work in a coffee house.”
Soon, news organizations and periodicals from every continent were knocking at the Olmsteads’ door. Marla exhibited her work in Manhattan galleries and had her paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and so came Bar-Lev. “It only took a few hours for me to realize that interactions with Marla Olmstead were not going to be possible unless I played with her, like you would play with a normal kid.”
Unfortunately, according to Marla’s parents and family friends in the documentary, news organizations compulsively searched for more and more fodder for the Marla Olmstead story. A particular feature on 60 Minutes sullied the good name of the Olmsteads when Marla couldn’t produce a painting of her gallery work on camera, even a hidden one.
The family got pounds upon pounds of hate mail and Marla’s paintings stopped selling.
The storm climaxes with a horrifyingly awkward scene in which Mark Olmstead puts his foot in his mouth and does not let go. At one point, the family turns to Amir Bar-Lev and practically pleads with him to fix their position.
“It made me understand why artists stopped painting representationally,” Bar-Lev said.
“I think one of the reasons Jackson Pollock and his peers started painting abstractly is to point out that works of art are not windows into another reality, rather works of expression,” Bar-Lev said. “They wanted to draw attention to the act of expressing as much as the object of representation.”