As part of revamping the gallery's website (I'm working mostly part-time for my mom's gallery while she goes to classes. It doesn't pay the ridiculous amounts of money I was hoping for, but it works), I am formatting our
artist biography pages for the new look and editing a lot of the garbly ignorant material I have to work with.
In some cases, I am merely reproducing the artists' statements we have on file for certain artists. An artist's statment is a semi-sacrosanct document displayed during gallery openings that allows the artist to make a case for whatever he wasn't able to clearly communicate through his artwork.
Wanting to make my website look professional, but also not wanting to make anyone mad for messing with their original concepts, I am torn on a lot of these.
One guy, for instance, keeps capitalizing things in a semi-religious sense that I really don't want to violate:
This Pipe was originally being created to serve as a Ceremonial Pipe. however, part way through the carving process, a small fissure was discovered in the stone that would make it unusable in Ceremony. Instead of discarding the precious stone, the artist continued to create the Pipe.
How bound am I to preserve those capitalizations? In the cases where I'm just re-wording statements that sound uneducated and juvenile, I have no qualms about slashing up their original statement - they weren't intentionally wording things poorly.
But with this guy... I don't know. He also uses quotation marks all over the place:
Even though it will not be used in Ceremony, it still contains its own "Medicine."
I think I'm axing the quotes, but unsure about the capitalization.
Any thoughts for an unqualified editress?