artistic expression/city's home of knowledge and literacy (or idiot vs. idiot)

[sparkle_shortz]

The misspelled mosaic has pitted art advocates against language purists. Some argue that artistic expression allows the artist to spell "Gaugan" (the painter known to those who can spell as Gauguin) however she likes, and others say such mistakes do not belong anywhere near the city's home of knowledge and literacy.I find it odd that there is no

Comments

[otis_otis]

This is funny - there are perfectly good reasons to create laws against altering public art without the artist's consent, but this really isn't one of them. She made mistakes, that's all. It's not like she deliberately misspelled "Einstein" as part of the content of the piece. It's a mistake, plain and simple.

But let's face it - the woman is a mosaic artist. We can be fairly sure she's not getting rich off Uncle Sucker. I expect that the 6 grand or whatever the corrections cost is a pretty substantial portion of her profit on the piece. And spending the time and money without compensation probably would make a major difference in her ability to make a decent living off her art.

socking away my mosaic chump change...

[sparkle_shortz]

Ezackly. (That was an artistic misspelling btw).

[anonymous]

Is it just or especially Americans? Genuinely curious, here.

I've noticed that about myself, because I frequently deal with broken English, written by people who are manifestly much smarter than me. O, for example, is a terrible speller. In English. Which is no surprise since it's not his first language or even his first alphabet. And I know he is, in fact, a good bit smarter than me. So, why should spelling errors cause cognitive dissonance? And yet they do.

Kind of tangential, fun story. G,O, and N were chatting online. G decided he wanted to say something to O that N wouldn't understand, so he and O switch to German. N wants to know what they're saying so he fires up Babelfish, which immediately deciphers all of what G's text, but none of O's, due to O's sporadic spelling errors.

(N is Nasser. G, and O I always refer to by their first initials.)

[sparkle_shortz]

I don't know in the larger context--in the context of the film, it's basically just that they are telling the story of spelling and Americana. Spelling bees are very much an American phenomenon, so while the skill may be associated with intelligence all over, they don't seem to have made it into a competition in other places, necessarily.