A Young Painter Who's Really Skipping Ahead

Marla Olmstead, 6, at the opening of her first show on the West Coast. One of her abstract works is priced at $25,000. (By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)

ENCINO, Calif It is the late afternoon -- the sugar hours -- of her first solo show on the West Coast, and the abstract expressionist Marla Olmstead is clomping around on the blond wood floors of the storefront art space, clop, clop, clop, in big, pointy high heels.

Anne Kleins. Size eightish. Ink black.

Her publicist, the gallery owners, her family, a documentary filmmaker, several photographers: huddling, indulgent, wary, loving, respectful -- yet all watching.

Around and around the gallery the young artist Olmstead goes. Giggling. Clop. Clop. The workmen are putting the finishing touches on the title cards for the Saturday evening opening. The big canvases, six-footers, the enigmatic fuzzy circle titled "Burning Blue Ball" and the itchy, angry "Mosquito Bite" and the yellow-and-orange slash work called "Zane Dancing."

Top asking price: $25,000.

That figure -- a new kitchen? -- produces a queasy questioning about career paths not chosen. But it does not seem to impress Olmstead one way or another.

She is? Just clomping. Then. Shush. Wait. She is eating a pretzel now. Portent? She has discarded the muse shoes, which are actually her mother's. She is now barefoot. She is making choo-choo sounds. She is bliss? She begins to crawl on her belly. She is a frog. She is hiding under a table.

She is 6 years old.

Why are we -- the adults -- here? Here in Encino, in the baking San Fernando Valley, at a gallery triangulated by a Mr. Kosher grocery store, a White Rabbit adult novelty emporium and a place, seriously, called the Titanic Traffic School? Why does anybody do anything anymore? A network morning talk show host suggested, on camera, before millions, after admitting that she didn't know much about art, that Marla's work reminded her of Jackson Pollock.

Anthony Brunelli, an artist and gallery owner in her home town of Binghamton, N.Y., who sells Marla's work (and therefore has a financial hedge in all this), suggested she might be a "genius." Some prefer the term "child prodigy." Articles in papers in New York, London and Rome reference Kandinsky, Miro and Klee -- and Marla Olmstead.

She began her career when she was not quite 2.

What does a collector get, for the price of a mid-size Mazda? That is a good question. We don't have the answer. Because the real question is: What is art? And more to the point: What is kiddie art? And have they taken over?