In today’s second On the Square feature, Gabriel Torretta considers the toddler that is taking the art world by storm :
Modern art’s greatest search is for a definition of itself. The meta-question—What is art?—often overwhelms the specific questions of art theory, like the nature of beauty, the use of symbol, and the like. Certainly most of us who have wandered through rooms of concatenated geometric shapes, blank canvases, piles of trash, and splatters of paint have felt, and maybe even entertained, the uncouth question: Why is this art?
Chelsea’s Agora Gallery is running a show by an artist who, all unawares, is bringing that question to the fore yet again. Aelita Andre is four years old, and has been playing with paint since she was nine months old. The Gallery’s official page states that Andre “created her first significant body of work before reaching the age of two.”
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