6th lesson - Maria Olmstead

 It was the 6th lesson of Investigating Issues in Art. Me including my classmates watched a video of young girl name Maria Olmstead. Maria Olmstead is a girl who were interested in painting and she ended up as media attraction. Now she is an abstract artist and her works are marvelously amazing. However, there were controversy about her works. According to the research, in February 2005,  a report by CBS News' 60 Minutes II raised questions about whether Marla created the paintings on her own. 60 Minutes enlisted the help of Ellen Winner, a child psychologist who studies cognition in the arts and gifted children. Winner was impressed with Marla's work, and indicated that Marla was the first child prodigy she'd seen paint abstractly. The Olmsteads agreed to permit CBS crews to set up a hidden camera in their home to tape their daughter painting a single piece in five hours over the course of a month. When Winner reviewed the tapes, the psychologist said that she saw no evidence that Maria was a child prodigy in painting. She saw a normal, charming, adorable child painting the way preschool children paint, except that Maria had a coach who kept her going. Winner also indicated that the painting created before CBS's hidden camera looked less polished than some of Marla's previous works. So after this there were lot of controversy going around between Marla and her father. Then on the 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev, examines Marla Olmstead, her family, and the controversy surrounding the art attributed to her. The film does not explicitly take a position on the question of her works' authenticity, but Bar-Lev is heard during his interviews of Marla's parents and in a piece included as an extra on the DVD expressing doubts about whether Marla created the paintings herself. It includes extracts from start-to-finish videos of two of Marla's works and questions whether the two works, the 60 Minutes painting (known as "Flowers") and "Ocean," are of the same quality as other works attributed to her. After Bar-Lev expressed these doubts and began filming Marla to capture her painting a work of similar quality to paintings previously sold in her name, she is seen repeatedly asking her father to help her paint a face on the painting or paint it himself - the exchange taking place during playful jest between Marla and her father.

 When lecturer asked us about her works which Marla painted or her father painted, many of my classmates thought that her father helped her or he did the painting, but for me although the way they were painted(previous works) are different than her works(Flowers and Ocean), still I could see the basic style of her painting. It is true that her works’ qualities are worse than the previous works, but what if the quality of painting got worse because of media attraction which made her somehow uncomfortable or pressure and these leaded her to bad condition (or could be slump)? Or what if she coincidentally painted those previous works (which mean randomness)? This might explained that her works’ qualities got worse due to the media attractions or it could be merely just a luck that she painted in those ways.