In my previous post, I discussed my reaction to watching My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about 4-year-old art phenom Marla Olmstead and her family. Last night I finished watching the film, and was amazed to hear Anthony Brunelli-- artist, gallery owner and promoter of Marla's work, say that he thought "modern art is a scam."
Brunelli complained that it takes him months to paint one of his large photo-realism canvases, and yet the most he has been able to sell a painting for is $100,000. Yet a modernist abstract painting might sell at auction for much more. It makes you want to cry.
First of all, the amount of time it takes to make a painting has relatively little to do with its actual quality or worth in the marketplace. Let's take novels as an example: it could take one writer ten years, and another ten months to write one, but that's now how we decide which one is better. This is true in any of the arts.
It may take an artist a day, a week, a month or a year to make a painting, but what about all the years of experience it took to gain the ability to be able to do it? What about all the intangibles: confidence, spirit, energy, color sense, and so forth, that go into the making of visual art?
Later in the documentary, Brunelli calls Marla Olmstead "a genius." Is she a genius because he's making a fortune selling her paintings, or has he changed his opinion about "modern art"?
My final reaction to the documentary was inspiration. Marla made me want to get back in the studio and paint.
