Tikkabik

So there's a bit of a tiff going on in Livermore, Calif. over a large ceramic mosaic that's been put up outside the city's new library. It contains the names of more than one hundred influential historical figures, and close to a dozen of them are misspelled. Sort of a blemish for a building dedicated to learning.

The artist who created the work is Maria Alquilar, and she's based out of Miami, Fla. I confess I'm not familiar with her work or anything about her personally, but it seemed that she was on-track to do the right thing -- pay my expenses and give me a little on top of it (another $6,000 plus expenses on top of the $40,000 she's already been paid) to make it worth my while, she said, and I'll fix it. That's kind of a lame deal but what were the city officials to do? They agreed to it (just barely -- it was a 3 to 2 vote).

But now, she says, no joy. Why? She's apparent gotten "vile hate mail" from people who are upset that she made the mistakes to begin with. And that's enough to make her change her mind.

Alquilar claims that people who " are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words" and that the mistakes wouldn't register with a true artist. But she didn't just bollox up the names of a few obscure figures. She left the N off of Einstein. There's an A missing in Shakespeare. She even got Michelangelo wrong -- that one's especially embarassing for someone who professes some knowledge of the history of art, as Alquilar demonstrates with her Blake quotes .

I don't remember anything in reading Blake's concept of The Divine Vision that gets people off the hook for lousy proofreading, but I guess I'm just not enlightened enough. It occurs to me that for $40,000, the least you could do is make sure your stuff is spelled right -- especially for a piece that's hanging outside a frickin' library.

Hey, all of us make mistakes -- Lord knows I screw up my spelling enough in the course of my job, even with the help of a spell-checker, though it's most often with a misplaced homonym that slips in there despite my best efforts. But I acknowledge the mistake, correct it, and move on. It takes a true artist -- a bullshit artist, that is -- to blame their own mistakes on other people's lack of artistic vision or enlightenment.

Bottom line is this: If Maria Alquilar isn't up for public scrutiny over her work, that's her prerogative. But perhaps she oughtn't to accept commissions to make public works -- though a quick check over her Web site shows that this Livermore installation is far from her first, as she's done work elsewhere in California and in Arizona as well. What she absolutely should do is make this right -- regardless of whatever heat she's receiving -- especially after the City of Livermore agreed to her terms.