Kate Moss, Tiziano Vecelli and John Major

[ewx]

Maybe it's just me but I think I'd much rather have sculptures than paintings, and even if you don't share my taste, at £1.5M per statue we could have over 60 solid gold Kate Mosses scattered around the country for the £100M required for two paintings.

You might vary the model a bit: I think a larger-than-life solid gold statue of Sir John Major would be a marvelous thing - both as a satire on his grey reputation and a tangible acknowledgment of his bit-part in this country's recent slew of Olympic gold medals.

Who would do you nominate for golden immortality?

Apparently gold costs around £14,000/kilo so the BBC's quoted value of £1.5M for a 50kg statue suggests that the sculptor's time is worth Kate Moss's weight in gold.

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I reckon that a life-size solid John Major would cost about £20M in materials, so £100M would get about a 1.7x real-height statue.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Are you assuming 'solid gold' = 'not hollow'? I think it means 'not plated something else'.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I was assuming that, yes. I guess "solid gold" might not imply "solid" as well as "gold".

[knell.livejournal.com]

Giant gold statues of political leaders are all the rage in places like North Korea. I think a huge golden statue of John Major with his hand upraised to the loyal workers of the country would be a fantastically ironic gesture. Make it so.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

OK. Got a couple of million quid spare?

[naath.livejournal.com]

I think I like the paintings better. But I've never really understood the desire to own the actual painting (presumably humungous) rather than a nice print of same. Except maybe if you know the artist and want to give them money.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Prints are rarely the same size as the paintings - most are smaller, but some (notably some prints of the Mona Lisa) are bigger than the original.

In watercolors (and possibly pastels) a print is about as good as the original. For an oil or acrylic painting, a print is nothing like it. It loses depth - both physical and tonal - and simply doesn't have the same appeal. IMO of course.

[emperor]

I think there should be a solid gold statue of emperor

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

When I am a Trillionaire I shall invest several billion into a space program with the explicit intention of putting a life-sized, solid gold statue of me on the top of Olympus Mons with the caption:

Edith, God-Emperor of Rome 1872AD

carved into the plinth.

In this way I mean to make it into the history books for all the wrong reasons.

[simont]

suggests that the sculptor's time is worth Kate Moss's weight in gold

Perhaps you have to pay the sculptor at least as much money for completing the statue as their raw materials are worth, otherwise they just sell the raw materials on eBay and make more money :-)

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Well, what you need is a sculptor whose good name as a sculptor is worth more to them than the gold (well, maybe you can factor in a discount for the inconvenience of skipping the country and the risk of getting caught). Those sculptors charge high prices, pretty much by definition.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

The £100m for the paintings seems wildly high. We could probably get a very good copy for that sort of money..

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Someone seemed to think that he was deliberately and acknowledgedly selling at (in his estimation) the top of the market, though I can't find a cite for that in any of the online press. Still, if even partially true, a bubble in art prices could explain the excessive cost.

[sparrowsion]

One factor here is that the paintings have historical value, which the sculpture does not (yet).