Doing it for the children

I find it highly cathartic to write an angry letter every now and then. This is one I emailed to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is trying to prevent the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School from going by the initials GOK, which might diminish or tarnish the artist’s legacy…somehow. Anyway, I like this letter so much that I’m going to print it out, put it in an envelope, sacrifice one of my pretty pretty Jackie Robinson stamps, and allow a mail carrier to deliver it.

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To those who make the decisions [I considered, and decided against, Dear Wankers]:

I just read this article about your museum, and to tell you the truth, it made me a little sick. You’re a well-respected art museum that apparently has all the grace and compassion of a school-yard bully. It has been said that there’s no such thing as bad press, but I’m pretty sure you know that this is simply not true. We live in the age of the Internet now, and I am always begrudgingly impressed when highly visible entities like the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum display such an appalling lack of awareness of how quickly information spreads via this medium.

I read just a few minutes ago on Metafilter (consistently listed as one of Time Magazine’s Top 25 and PC Magazine’s Top 100 Classic web sites) that your museum is trying to get the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School of Albuquerque, NM not to go by its initials, as if having people pronounce “gawk” for GOK would somehow diminish this amazing artist’s legacy. There’s quite a lively discussion going on over at Metafilter about the way that your museum is doing a fine job on its own of tarnishing the legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe. There’s a lot of sympathy in that thread, but none of it lies with you. And I don’t think that Metafilter is somehow unique in its interpretation of this situation. I sincerely doubt that anybody is going to say, “Well, I used to respect Georgia O’Keeffe, but ever since that one elementary school in Santa Fe started going by GOK, I realized how vastly overrated she was as an artist and have since allowed my membership to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to lapse.”

More than anything, I wonder what you could be thinking by even allowing your ridiculousness to continue through several rounds of emails, letters, and now the serious threat of legal action. I’m curious to know whether you are somehow unfamiliar with the plight of public schools in this nation in general, and Albuquerque in particular. It’s not as though schools are raking in the dough hand over fist, so why would you think it prudent to threaten the school over its use of Ms. O’Keeffe’s initials? You do realize that she was a former schoolteacher, right? I can’t imagine, if she were still living, that her sympathies would lie with you, either. And let’s not forget the very real fact that the school had this name before your museum even owned the rights to Ms. O’Keeffe’s trademark.

In the olden days (say, the late 1980s), awareness of this story might not have reached very far. Locals might have tsked, and if it was a particularly slow news day, you might have made it onto one of the nightly news programs. Dan Rather would have used some indecipherable phrase to illustrate how dastardly he found your behavior (because “like stealing candy from a baby”) would have been to easy, and Peter Jennings would have said something amazingly erudite that would have made you look like graceless money-grubbers.

But now we’ve got blogs, 24-hour news cycles (it’s always a slow news day somewhere), incessant social networking, and online communities with near-global reach. And just like I’m posting this on my web site, Facebook page, and twitter feed, somebody I know is going to see this and pass it along, too. I’ve got friends all over the world, and being that I am a librarian, several of them work in museums, archives, and libraries. We’re used to feeling like the good guys, and this will be passed along just as a sheer oddity. I mean, shouldn’t an entity dedicated to the preservation of an artist’s works, spirit, and legacy be on the side of education? Who are you saving this legacy for, if not the people who will grow up in a world where knowledge of Georgia O’Keeffe recedes further and further into the past? And what about the students affected by your misguided attempt to prevent the disrespect of Ms. O’Keeffe’s legacy? Let me tell you: you’re doing a heckuva job at disrespecting your raison d’etre all by yourselves. At this point, all that the kids at that school are going to remember is that they were named after a woman whose memory was left in the hands of seriously misguided, greedy people.

I am utterly disgusted by your behavior.

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So there.