Sometimes people can make you feel great. A snappy conversation with a waitress while you order your Spam musubi or a big hug from your son at the end of the day can add a little sparkle.
Sometimes people can make you feel like they just dumped a rectum-load on you.
Take, for example, Maria Alquilar.
Ms. Alquilar is an artist. She is also a complete ass.
The city of Livermore, California just spent $40,000 on a ceramic mural for their new library. It sat for two years in Ms. Alquilar's studio as bureaucratic hoops were jumped through so that the damned thing could actually be installed. The mural has the names of 175 historical figures on it. The names of Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and seven others are misspelled.
Some folks might scoff. The artist spent countless hours on her hands and knees piecing the mural together. City officials had two years to catch any typos (tile-os?) in the thing as they fiddly farted around trying to get the thing installed.The scoffers might wonder how brain dead does a person have to be to allow something like this happen.
Well, I work as a technical writing manager. Editing is a big part of my job. I understand that it is impossible for a writer to effectively edit their own work. That's why we have reviews. Even so, I've experienced the joy of finally recognizing a defective first-level heading in a doc that's undergone multiple reviews past many sets of eyeballs over weeks. It's difficult to see past what you expect to see and recognize error.
For example, take the following chunk of text. Read it out loud to yourself:
A bird in the
the hand is worth two in the
the bush.
Readers familiar with this old chestnut and the more astute will catch the doubled articles "the the". Multiply this by hundreds or thousands and you might start to understand how even glaring errors can slip through. (Much thanks to the cock-sucking, brain-washing, cult fuckers at Lifespring for bringing this to my attention many years ago. Yes, I'm bitter.)
Given all this, I expect that the original specification for the mural went something like this: "Make it big with lots of colors. Also, add a bunch of famous names." Without any formal process for review, I'm not surprised that I'm reading about the mural's comical unveiling in the local paper.
Now, if things had just been left like this, I'd have just chuckled, grinned knowingly, and then moved on, but no, Maria Alquilar has to go all ape shit on us.
Instead of just calmly and placidly accepting the situation, the Great Artiste gets all huffy, defensive, and painfully stupid.
She insists that such misspellings wouldn't even register with a true artisan.
The idiot savant goes on to state: "The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words. In their mind the words register correctly."
Just what we need: yet another overeducated twat-face reinforcing the stereotype that all folks with humanities degrees are a bunch of sloppy, ignorant, ineffective, nebbish, soft-brained, pantywaists who wouldn't be able to tell an electrolytic capacitor from a wire-wound resistor and who would gladly see us regress to the time before Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary, all because they can't spell for shit.
I understand that some folks just can't spell very well. I understand that many folks don't care even the tiniest fraction as much as I do. But to suggest that a disregard for the rules is somehow superior because it indicates a higher artistic sensibility is simply evidence of a brain in total cognitive surrender.
Language is primarily a medium of communication. Art can use language as a mode of expression that is independent of communication and meaning. All this is well and good. You can have your slithy toves gyre and gimble all over the wabe, but if taxpayers have coughed up $40K for art outside a library, you'd better freakin' well spell Einstein's name correctly.
Pakeha
[Source article: Artist to fix misspellings of Livermore library mural, (10-06) 15:35 PDT LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP)]
*UPDATE*
Since I first started this column, Ms. Alquilar has sunk to new levels of pretension and pigheadedness.
She now refuses to participate in amending the mural because of a slew of "nasty messages from people who don't understand art."
It would appear that Ms. Alquilar suffers from a severe case of recto-cranial impaction.
If she weren't so close-minded, she'd realize that her personal, Romantic conception of art is merely one facet of the multifarious construct that is Art.
You see, there's this other facet, the Neoclassical movement, that includes amongst its tenets "a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of thought which hold it together."
One of those "communal commonplaces" might just be the spelling of intensely famous people.
She continues to shovel on the B.S. as she declares "None of us are particularly good spellers anymore because of computers."
You know, before she insulted me and everyone who cares about spelling, I was willing to cut Ms. Alquilar a lot of slack.
The Great Artiste goes on to demonstrate her complete lack of familiarity with the male form and with reality when she asks rhetorically "When you look at Michelangelo's David, do you point out that one (testicle) is lower than the other?"
I don't point this out because that is how the vast majority of bean bags are configured. It probably has something to do with the practical consideration of keeping nards from smacking together like castanets between the thighs.
After she's learned that Livermore has considered casting the mural as a "Where are the misspelling?", Alquilar sputters out "Can you imagine them suggesting that a work of art be used as a game?" A colorful ceramic mural at a library being used as a game? How utterly denigrating!
The best thing Ms. Alquilar could do now is just keep her trap shut. Every syllable that passes her lips that the reporters print just buries her deeper.
Something tells me that this isn't the last of it.
[Source article: Miffed artist doesn't want to correct misspellings / Muralist offended by 'nasty' criticism of Livermore piece, Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer, Saturday, October 9, 2004]
Pakeha