BRAINSTORM
By Barry Ritholtz - July 4th, 2009, 10:15AM
BRAINSTORM is a work by Long Island sculptor Alex Wagman.
Unlike most of Wagman’s other statues, which were cast from bronze, it is made of fiberglass. Why?
“I can’t afford to do it in bronze,” he says.
For Brainstorm, “I sprayed the surface several times with an epoxy in which I added silver metal powder. Then I used abrasives on it, and it looks like polished metal.”
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July 4th, 2009 at 7:28 am
It is a minor bit of fallout from the rise in commodity prices, which has sent the cost of bronze, a copper-tin alloy, to levels unthinkable a decade ago, even though they are now below their peak. Dale Smith, owner of the Artworks Foundry in Berkeley, Calif., says he spent $1.60 a pound for bronze in July 2005 and $4 in July 2008, while Marjee Levine, manager of the New England Sculpture Service in Boston, saw the price go from $2 to “almost $5″ in the same span. The price is now about $2.50 to $3. Indeed, the worldwide demand for copper — which makes up 95% of bronze — has even led to the thefts of outdoor sculptures for their scrap-metal value.
Besides the sculptors’ labor and reputation, the main ingredients in a sculpture’s price are the costs of whatever it is made from and the fee for having a foundry cast it. Given bronze’s high price, sculptors’ traditional rule of thumb — that a work should be priced at three times the casting cost — doesn’t make sense. “If I had done Brainstorm [which is still unsold] in bronze, I’d have to charge $70,000, instead of $20,000,” Wagman says. That higher amount probably would have repelled his regular customer base, which usually forks over $9,000 to $25,000 for his works.
But high cost is the mother of invention…and clever patinas.
July 4th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Too bad it doesn’t look like Alan Greenspan in addition to being produced 3 years ago. Then Bill Fleckenstein would’ve had his cover for “Greenspan’s Bubbles”.
Here’s a 2005 picture of Alan for comparison purposes:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/86112/123846/Alan-Greenspan-being-presented-the-Presidential-Medal-of-Freedom-by