October 07, 2004
If yew kan drahw this, yew culd bee an ahrtist!
This is for all those educators who wish we'd stop focusing so much on reading and math and spend more time on developing the natural artistic abilities - and self-esteem - of students.
You wouldn't expect to see a lot of misspelled words when you enter a public library.
That's why a California city is paying thousands of dollars to an artist so she'll correct the words she misspelled on a giant mural in the entryway of the new main library. Eleven of the 175 words and names are misspelled, including Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and Einstein.
Artist Maria Alquilar was initially paid $40,000 for the mosaic. Now, the city will pay another $6,000 plus her travel expenses from Miami for her to correct the work.
Alquilar blames city leaders for not catching what she calls "oversights."
Sounds like Alquilar's artistic abilities - and sense of self-worth! - are quite intact, despite the fact that she misspelled the names of some of the greatest artists and scientists of all time.
The Miami Herald has more:
Before Miami artist Maria Alquilar completed a $40,000 ceramic mural recently installed outside a Livermore, Calif., library, she might have wanted to step inside to consult an encyclopedia.
Of the 175 brightly colored words in the mosaic -- a testament to literary and historic figures such as Einstein, Shakespeare and Van Gogh -- 11 were misspelled.
''This work is a fantastic work,'' said Alquilar, perplexed and frazzled by all the fuss. "It was meant to bring particularly young people an understanding of the interlacing of cultures.''
Emphasis mine. How dare we boogewasay types criticize her artistic creation by nattering on about correct spellings, of all things! So what if this creation was for a library - one cannot place such limits on the artistic impulse!
And it gets better:
Though the artistic faux pas was noticed within days of the installation in March, the city of Livermore -- a suburb outside San Francisco -- agreed this week to pay an additional $6,000 plus travel expenses for Alquilar's return to fix the errors.
No, thank you, says the artist. She's not about to fly to California until the museum issues an apology. ''Quite frankly, I'm really upset about this,'' Alquilar said. "Nobody at the library has said what a great work it is.''
Indeed, the folks at the Livermore library can't quite overlook the mosaic "typos'': Einstein sans one ''n''; Shakespeare minus one ''a;'' Van Gogh with a ''u'' in it; Michelangelo plus an extra "a''...
''I wasn't concerned with the words, they were signposts,'' meant to stimulate an interest in learning, Alquilar told The Herald on Wednesday night. ''People that really love art, they wouldn't even have noticed it if they hadn't pointed it out,'' she said.
Emphases mine, again. My, somebody was paying attention the day the teacher said that "Your self-esteem has nothing to do with your accomplishments!" in class. Alquilar is refusing to fix the mural until she gets an apology for the library pointing out that she screwed up? People who notice spelling errors in the names of great artists must not really "love" art? Unbelieveable.
My more cynical Devoted Readers will not be surprised at all by Alquilar's former profession:
Alquilar, a former schoolteacher, was among four artists who applied for the job. It took her a year to create the mural.
She says that shifting the focus to an ''inconsequential'' oversight and away from the work misses the point entirely. ''I didn't go to the book and flip it open, because you don't do that when you're sculpting,'' explained Alquilar, whose works have been displayed in the Smithsonian Institution and the Rockefeller Collection, among other museums and galleries. "And I didn't even think of checking because I thought they were right.''
Emphasis mine, once more. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why someone who shows such a great loathing for looking up "inconsequential" facts in books is now a "former" school teacher? Something tells me she wouldn't have been a fan of NCLB.
The one valid point she makes here is that someone else really should have noticed the errors in the work before it was installed, two years after it was completed. But her outrageous defense of making the errors in the first place suggests that she would have been less than open to criticism of any kind, at any point in the "artistic" process.
I can't watch videos on my (old, slow) home computer, but apparently there's one here:
http://www.foxreno.com/news/3788214/detail.html
The Fark posters, ever the lively bunch, point out that Ms. Alquilar might have seen the light if all the news article about this mess had misspelled her name. Another local poster, eatcaramels, took this photo of one of the misspellings:
The prevailing theme seems to be - $46,000 for that?
Finally, from her website, we read a description of another library mural:
The words and the quotes along with the esthetics of the work is designed to engage the viewer at the basic esthetic level to the intellectual and spiritual levels if the viewer takes advantage of the vast wealth of material that the library has to offer.
I guess I don't have enough of a love of art to understand that.
Update: Don't miss the followup, here.
Posted by kswygert at October 7, 2004 07:41 AM