Your Tax Dollers Dollars at Work (Gloriously Misspelled Mosaic Edition)

Reader Ari Spanier passes along this link about muralist Maria Alquilar, who flubbed the names of Einstein, Van Gogh, and others in a wall-sized mosaic for the Livermore, California, public library. Alquilar got an extra $6,000 to fix her own mistakes.

Whole story here.

Comments

[JSM]

I was hearing about this on NPR this morning. I was quite surprised there was no obvious warranty for the originally purchased mural let alone the fact that they had to pay her to come back to fix her own "hey everyone, I'm an idiot" mess.

[Chuck]

That was sort of my initial reaction too, but I don't really know how you put a "factually accurate" clause in a commission contract for an art piece. Because, you know, it's art, and sometimes things are done "wrong" on purpose to draw attention and create conversations. The artist could easily claim that these misspellings are intentional, and intended to be provocative.

I don't really believe that either, I'm just saying that including some clause requiring accurate spelling in a commission isn't as easy as it may sound. Hopefully some lessons have been learned by the city, but probably not.

[Ruthless]

You couldn't trust that fat commie married to Frida Kalo not to fuck up one of his murals too.
Back in his day, even one of the Rockefellers was not sucker enough to pay extra for the fuck-up though.

[poco]

Girlfriend needs to get over herself. She's as defensive as she was the first time around (what, about 9 months ago?), when she claimed not that it was intentional, but that it's Art and she was Inspired and the Process was more important than checking inconsequential details, and anyone who disagrees has no Artistic Vision. She's got the artist's temperament, but the talent and intelligence remain to be seen. I predict she will eventually become a crazy old cat lady, if she isn't already. I thought about sending her some hate mail, but decided she'll never understand.

[Akira MacKenzie]

Now I don't feel so bad when I make a spelling/grammar error online. At least I don't cost the tax payers thousands when I screw-up here on H&R.

[Alex]

The funny thing is that the greatest concentration of libertarians I've ever been around was in Livermore. But what can you do when others run the local government?

[Rick Barton]

Government gigs-Folks get financially rewarded, not punished for screw-ups!

[Rick Barton]

...it's the taxpayer who gets punished.

[Ken]

score:
Taxeaters 1
Taxpayers 0

[Briana]

Hey Ken, how've you been? Haven't seen you on here for a while. Glad to see you're still keeping score...

[mediageek]

But Alquilar -- who last year claimed artistic license and said she wasn't going to fix the faux pas because people were being too mean about it - - was in no mood to talk.

I ran Chyron* for a news station for a bit over two years. It was my job to make sure that the names and places that popped onto the lower part of the screen were for the correct names and places. In my time there, I fucked up less than this lady, and felt like a putz every time.

But then again, I was making bad wages. Perhaps if I'd been as over paid as this broad, I could try to chalk it up to artistic license and not have people laugh, too.

Naaaah.

*Think of it as a hardware-only version of PhotoShop v.2 that costs several thousand dollars and the only time it ever crashes is either five minutes before a live newscast or right in the middle of it.

[mediageek]

Er, when I said news station, I meant TV station.

Crappy, midmarket tv station.

[Factory]

In an earlier story on this case, Alquilar stated that the designs 'as is' we okayed by the person she was working for. If that is so, I'm on Alquilar's side. I hate it when ppl ok stuff and then turn around and biatch about it when it is finished, then they act as if it is your fault.

[Evan Williams]

Factory, even if that account was true, my guess is that the person probably ok'd it after she had hard-set the tiles.

[R C Dean]

In an earlier story on this case, Alquilar stated that the designs 'as is' we okayed by the person she was working for.

Were the designs sketches? If so, did they include the mis-spellings?

If some putz of a librarian screwed the pooch and told me to go ahead, I would be pretty peeved about them coming back later and asking me to redo for free.

Except, that is, for the part about having too much self-respect/being too vain to leave such a total cock-up out in public with my name on it.

[linguist]

I don't know why she's so defensive, but it looks to me like she may be dealing with some dyslexia. Sometimes those "artistic gifts" come at the expense of other abilities.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Maybe the Livermore public library should have misspelled the muralist's name on that $6,000 check, just as a joke, of course.

[Nathaniel Brandon]

I don't know why she's so defensive, but it looks to me like she may be dealing with some dyslexia. Sometimes those "artistic gifts" come at the expense of other abilities.

For 40 kilobucks you'd think that she'd be

A)Aware of her disability
B)Able to take steps to minimize it

I can't do math to save my life, but I'm smart enough to go get a calculator if it means not screwing up.

[mediageek]

Well, so much for that username thing.