Is there some reason that all “public art” must be stupid and pointless? There’s the giant copper sand dollar thing in downtown Charlotte, for example. And here in San Francisco, there are assorted sculptures and fountains all over town which look like nothing so much as abstract representations of human intestines…
And then there’s this mural in Livermore, you see. It looks like it was created by a twelve-year-old. A twelve-year-old who can’t spell. A very DEFENSIVE twelve-year-old who can’t spell. She (Maria Alquilar) was paid forty grand to do this piece of “public art” and she couldn’t even be bothered to spell the names of several rather famous artists and scientists correctly…
Obviously, Ms. Alquilar is no “Eistein” and she’s not a literary heavyweight (check out, the punctuation, and grammar, on the link to her site, above, you will see, a sample), but when confronted, she doesn’t even have the decency to apologize with diginity for her mistakes, but instead goes into tirades about how spelling is “unimportant” and complains that her errors are getting more attention than her “art”…
It’s disturbing enough that the city of Livermore paid so much money for this ridiculous-looking mural to begin with. But now, they’re actually planning to pay her MORE to come and fix her own errors. What they should be doing is suing her to get their money back…
Maybe then, they could find a REAL artist to do something a little more professional. Lord knows you’ll find typos and the occasional misspelling all over this website. But nobody handed me 40,000 bucks for creating it either…
And lest anyone get the mistaken idea that I’m making fun of someone whose primary language is not English, let me assure you that Ms. Alquilar speaks the language every bit as well as I do. She apparently just doesn’t write it very well…
