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October 11, 2004

Time to rant about Mreea Aquillarr...

From a recent Yahoo! News article:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Livermore, a California city that prides itself as a center of advanced science, is spending thousands of dollars to correct many misspelled names on a city library mosaic, including that of Albert Einstein, a city official said on Thursday.

The $40,000 mosaic outside the San Francisco area city's main library misspells the names of Einstein, the father of modern physics, William Shakespeare and other historical heavyweights. The city voted this week to spend $6,000 to fix the artwork.

"There were some members of the community who felt very strongly it had to be corrected," said city council member Lorraine Dietrich.

Livermore is home to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which does work on the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

Maria Alquilar, the Miami artist who made the mosaic, said the errors would have been discovered sooner had city officials inspected the mosaic closely before its installation as she had requested.

Let me see if I understand this all correctly. Livermore city officials pay Alquilar tens of thousands of dollars to produce a mosaic. Alquilar apparently doesn't feel such a paltry sum merits her taking the minimal time to spell-check her work before finalizing it, and blames others for not making sure she did her job worth a damn. Livermore city council members then fail to do their jobs worth a damn by rewarding the insipid Alquilar with another $6,000 (not counting her travel expenses). Of course. If she won't get it right for the original 40 grand, tossing another seventh of the original cost at her might inspire a work ethic within her.

But wait, it gets worse. The following, from another article:

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."

Alquilar said it took her quite a bit of her own time and money to create and install the work, and that it sat idle at her Santa Cruz studio for two years until the city cleared the way for its installation.

There were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters, she said.

"Even though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, I didn't see it," she said.

The mistakes wouldn't even register with a true artisan, Alquilar said.

"The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words," she said. "In their mind the words register correctly."

So...this typo-riddled fiasco-fresco sat in her studio for a full two years, but Alquilar thinks the fault for not spotting the misspellings still lies with those who were merely in the vicinity during its installation? You wanted your mosaic to unite people? Mission accomplished. Folks from all walks of life, all across the nation, are now in agreement that you're pompous and unable to admit a mistake (or, in this case, 11 mistakes). And if nerve, chutzpah or sheer gall were precious commodities, the last two paragraphs of this other article would be quite literally priceless. Yeah, anybody worried about spelling people's names right just doesn't "get it". Your artistically enlightened elite are above the petty concerns of having the letters appear in the correct order--or, indeed, appear at all. You wanker.

Other pearls of artistic wisdom from Alquilar, and my replies:

''Quite frankly, I'm really upset about this. Nobody at the library has said what a great work it is.''

They didn't get a great work. They got a $40,000 lemon. You'll have to forgive them if they didn't hurry out to kill the fattened calf for you when their eyes stumbled across the likes of Eistein, Shakespere, Van Gough, and Michaelangelo, to name a few.

''I wasn't concerned with the words, they were signposts."

We know you weren't concerned with the words--that's the problem. And even signposts usually try for correct spelling. That's how I can tell whether I'm headed for Chino, Chino Hills, Corona, or Norco.

''People that really love art, they wouldn't even have noticed it if they hadn't pointed it out."

Hey, sure. When I think of art lovers, I think of a moderately illiterate segment of society. Riiiiiiiight.

''I didn't go to the book and flip it open, because you don't do that when you're sculpting."

Quite right. You flip open a book before you sculpt.

"And I didn't even think of checking because I thought they were right.''

Lesson learned. After this, I hope you wouldn't try to spell the letter O with your pointer finger and thumb super-glued together without the aid of a dictionary.

''Wasn't it Shakespeare who wrote: 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet'?''

Wait. First you misspell his name, then you swipe one of his quotes to try and defend the misspelling? If lazy pretentiousness were a religion, this would serve as a damn good koan.

Did I mention that Alquilar is a former schoolteacher?

Pardon me while I grind my molars down to a fine dental dust...

(The upside to all this is that, in spell-checking this entry before posting it, I now know I'm just as qualified as anybody--and more qualified than some--to create and install artwork for Livermore, CA.)

Posted by patrick at October 11, 2004 07:48 PM

Comments

Posted by: Steph at October 12, 2004 10:09 AM

Posted by: Rich Lashua at October 12, 2004 10:13 AM

Posted by: Patrick Seitz at October 12, 2004 05:28 PM

Posted by: Rich Lashua at October 13, 2004 09:14 AM

Posted by: Jon Bastian at October 14, 2004 12:16 AM

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