Stupidity or hubris? You make the call.
Artist to fix misspellings of Livermore library mural. Apparently you do not have to be an Eisnstone, or Shakespeer to be an “artisan” in Florida.
It didn’t take a nuclear physicist to realize changes were needed after a $40,000 ceramic mural was unveiled outside the city’s new library and everyone could see the misspelled names of Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and seven other historical figures.
“Our library director is very frustrated that she has this lovely new library and it has all these misspellings in front,” said city councilwoman Lorraine Dietrich, one of three council members who voted Monday to authorize paying another $6,000, plus expenses, to fly the artist up from Miami to fix the errors.
Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names.
“The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people,” Alquilar said. “They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work.”
What gets me is the arrogance. Instead of apologizing and fixing the thing, the artist becomes the victim.
There used to be “controls” in place that prevented the deterioration of the English language.
In the past, the majority of information was passed via books, newspapers, magazines, memos, advertising and such. So … there were intermediaries that caught spelling errors and we were not exposed often to the way most people spell.
Poor “spellers” are not new, frequent exposure to poor “spellers” is new.
But, the work does unite people – in “denigrating” the mistakes. 😉
Did the AP reporter ask Aquilar to spell “denigrating”?
She would only have reason to be upset if they brought in another artist to correct the mistakes.
If I was the librarian and the artist refused to fix it for free, I’d shame her in public and then hire a different artist to fix it.
Artists hate other artists touching their work.
Unfortunately for the City of Livermore, the artist now refuses to fix the mistakes. According to a Times newspaper report dated 10/8, artist Maria Alquilar “has been harrassed so badly that she changed her mind” and now will not only not fix the work, she is now going to “talk with her lawyer about getting the city to pay her to have the mosaic removed altogether.” She is protected by state law in that installed public art cannot be changed or removed without the artist’s consent. The City needs to take responsibilty in that someone overseeing the project should have caught the mispellings before the tiles were installed. The artist could have avoided many of the problems and criticisms she is now facing if she had simply owned up to the mistakes and corrected them when she was first asked to do so.
If she sues, she’ll never get work again.
One can only hope she’ll never get work again….