A true artisan wouldn't care

I wrote in July about a library in California that commissioned a ceramic tile mosaic that, when finished, included several spelling errors. (See a picture of one here.)

The Livermore City Council voted last week to pay the misspelling artist $6,000 plus expenses to come back and fix her mistakes.

Let it be known that they could have hired me for half that price to edit the design before it was set in tile.

The artist is unforgiving:

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."

OK, that's funny. And a bit pathetic. But it doesn't hold a candle to this part:

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."

Here's to not being a true artisan, I guess.

And here's a list of the names she misspelled and how she spelled them.