The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page B

conversation on the phone, my wife got all excited and I said, ‘Okay, I want to talk to this guy, because he’s full of it,’” Doug said. “I was very, very worried for her going into that world. My wife was excited about it, about the prospect, and I was very dubious and I was skeptical.”
    The agent proposed a trial online auction, just to see how things went. He sold around $179,000 worth of Lauren’s art; Lauren’s cut amounted to more than $40,000. Lauren signed a representation agreement with the agency a couple of months later on her eighteenth birthday. Her parents contacted the school to help her set up a reduced schedule for the last semester of her senior year so she could travel to art events.
    â€œRight after that, it was bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,” Lauren said. She zipped off to shows and auctions across the country, making her way to New Jersey and New York, La Jolla and Las Vegas, Virginia and Maryland. “It’s something I had been dreaming about,” Lauren said. “Every time I would be working on my art, I’d have it in the back of my mind, imagining, what if I’m painting this for a show? I always dreamed it would be going somewhere else besides sitting in the attic.” Her price tags shot upward, with her large canvases eventually selling for around $20,000 each.
    In the midst of her immersion in the professional art world, Lauren graduated from high school. She rented studio space in Cleveland—a loft downtown with big windows, hardwood floors, and redbrickwalls—and then in a church on the east side where she worked in a converted space in the rafters. When she met Joanne in September 2010, she was officially a professional.
    â€œOther people began recognizing her talent far before we did, mainly because they had the context,” Doug recalled. “So here they are comparing what she is doing to all of these other children of the same age-group. We didn’t really have that ability to compare; we just saw what she was doing.”

    Jonathan’s and Lauren’s families aren’t polar opposites. Both kids come from financially stable, two-parent homes. Both families provided their kids with the supplies they needed to pursue their interest—a violin for Jonathan; paints and canvases for Lauren.
    But their families weren’t exactly following the same playbook, either. Lauren was almost entirely self-taught; Jonathan took violin lessons, piano lessons, and composition courses. Lauren’s family knew little of the art world; as she put it, “The whole art business—that was brand-new to all of us.” Jonathan’s parents knew the ropes. “I’m a musician,” Eve said. “A lot of the parents of prodigies aren’t musicians or aren’t this or aren’t that and are kind of lost, but my thing was, I’m a musician, I know what all the pitfalls are. I was gonna make it much easier for him to succeed than it was for me.”
    The question of how significantly parents contribute to their children’s achievements is an old one, and it’s one that prodigy parents often face. While many families seem bewildered by their child’s advanced abilities, there have, historically, been parents eager to take credit for their children’s achievements. In the 1910s, for example, a small group of parents proclaimed that they had turned their children into prodigies. One of these parents, Leo Wiener, a Harvard professor whose children included Norbert Wiener, a famous prodigy and eventual MIT mathematician, claimed that his children were “not precocious,” “not geniuses,” and “not even exceptionally bright.” “I could take almostany child and develop him in the same way,” Wiener said. “It is merely the method of imparting learning.”
    In other words, these parents claimed that their prodigies were normal children. They had no