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My Kid Could Paint ThatDoes Marla Olmstead's work belong in a museum or on the fridge?

By Mia FinemanPosted Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, at 7:33 AM ET

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Ann Hulbert examined Mozart as the original child prodigy. David Plotz asked if super-babies have super-parents. Jacob Weisberg cast Jackson Pollock as the classic doomed artist. Daniel Gross wondered if art is worth investing in.

Of course, neither Marla nor the elephants would be painting without some degree of instruction, encouragement, and access to quality art supplies. For this, Marla, who is now 7 and still painting, has her father. He sets her up with large primed canvases (measuring up to 5 square feet), tubes of acrylic paint, and an array of brushes, spatulas, and squirt bottles filled with watered-down pigment. The elephants have their trainers, called mahouts, who essentially collaborate with them, choosing the colors, proffering paint-loaded brushes, and, most importantly, whisking away the paper or canvas before it devolves into a drab, muddy mess. I suspect that Marla's dad plays a similar role in her creative process. The enthusiasm and unbridled spontaneity of a child or an elephant wielding a paintbrush can be beautiful to behold, but a successful abstract painting also requires a certain sober restraint, a capacity to step back, lay down the brush, and decide: This is it.

When people look at abstract paintings and say, "My kid could do that," they're right—up to a point. Given the right materials and a little bit of coaching, any kid—or elephant or chimpanzee—can produce something that looks like art, or at least something that looks like Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, artists like de Kooning and Pollock proposed a radically new way of thinking about painting: as the direct trace of the artist's physical engagement with the materials. Harold Rosenberg, the critic who first coined the term "action painting," put it like this: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." The Ab-Exers were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock's drips or de Kooning's arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.

Now, more than half a century later, we're still reeling from this revelation. Hence the continuing fascination with cases like Marla's. For those who believe that painting must be about something more than just color and gesture—like craft or technical skill or mimetic representation—abstract paintings by children and animals provide the ultimate refutation, proof that modern art is indeed a hoax. But such skeptics profoundly miss the point of the art they're trying to debunk. Yes, anyone can pick up a brush and slather paint on canvas in a drippy style that evokes Jackson Pollock. But it took an artist like Pollock to step back from his own work, which at the time looked unlike anything that had come before, and say, with bold conviction: "This is it. This is what modern painting looks like." In other words, Pollock taught us how to see art in a new way.

Marla, the elephants, and perhaps even your own brilliant progeny may be terrific painters—but they're not artists. This is because art is not just about making things or slapping pigment on canvas; it's also a way of thinking and seeing. Marla and the elephants are primitives, not prodigies. With no understanding of the issues at stake, there's little chance that their work will push art in any meaningful new direction. But this doesn't mean we should dismiss them entirely. As viewers, we can appreciate their paintings as art, even if they didn't intend them as such. And, as the stars of their own media circuses, these exuberant painters serve a crucial role as catalysts for discussion, inadvertently prodding a broader public to come to terms with the mid-century revolution in seeing that permanently and profoundly changed modern art.