Get Yer Statue of Liberty Here!
There may not be a bridge in Brooklyn currently available to purchase, but, for would-be owners of a New York landmark, the Statue of Liberty can be had for the low, low price of one million dollars. Sure, it’s not a hundred and fifty-one feet tall and doesn’t weigh five hundred and sixty thousand pounds. This Lady Liberty (ten feet, twelve hundred pounds) is one of twelve replicas of the plaster scale model that Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi made in 1878, recently cast in bronze with the aid of “3-D metrology.” It is on offer by the British dealer Ray Waterhouse, who lugged it to the Hamptons Fine Art Fair earlier this month. Arnold Schwarzenegger owns another of the dozen.
Before the statue braved the Long Island Expressway, though, she stopped in at the Natuzzi Italia furniture showroom on Madison Avenue, for a party. Guests posed next to her with one arm raised, while Rick Friedman, who runs the Hamptons fair, asked Waterhouse what differentiates U.K. and U.S. art collectors.
“Alan Clark, who was a minister under Margaret Thatcher, once said, detrimentally, of another politician, that he had to buy his furniture. In other words, he hadn’t inherited it,” Waterhouse explained. “So there’s more of a class system in British minds. It’s much more egalitarian here.”
Friedman anticipated that there would be interest in the Statue of Liberty out in the Hamptons. “I mean, anyone who walks into your house and sees this says, ‘Oh, my God.’ So someone wants an ‘Oh, my God’ piece? This is an ‘Oh, my God’ piece,” he said. “For a lot of these guys, it’s not about the money. They have the money.”
Two weeks later, at the art fair, the statue stood by the entrance. Inside, other Semiquincentennial-adjacent work was on offer. Grant Rosen, of Artnwordz Fine Art—who came to the art world after a career in theatre (he was the “stunt Beast” in a national tour of “Beauty and the Beast”)—talked about a Statue of Liberty-themed painting in his inventory. “It’s called ‘Land of Opportunity (Son of a Bitch, My Parents Lied),’ but we only show that at our international auctions,” he said. “It’s a gardener and he’s watering a money tree that’s in front of the Statue of Liberty, and she’s holding a solid 18k. gold lamé dollar-sign torch.” A print goes for twenty dollars; originals are upward of eight thousand.
The paper that Rosen uses for his art works is repurposed from books deaccessioned by archives like the Library of Congress—“water-damaged, fire-damaged, mold-damaged, rat-damaged, mouse-damaged.” What would otherwise be turned to pulp by the Treasury becomes the backdrop for portraits of the likes of Paul McCartney (popular in the Hamptons), Queen Elizabeth, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg hung one of Rosen’s portraits of her, wearing a diamond-dusted Brooklyn Dodgers cap and a pearl jabot, in her bedroom. He knows this because she sent him a note on Supreme Court letterhead, which reads, “It is a gem that lifts my spirits and brings smiles whenever I pass it.”
Additional patriotic art included a work by an Israeli painter named Gil Goren. Straight on, it depicted an American flag overlaid with the text “O’ER THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE.” From one side, the background became a solid gold square ($38,000). The artist Giancarlo Impiglia exhibited portraits of Washington and Lincoln (“oil and gold leaf on camouflage”). An editioned print by Shepard Fairey of John Lennon flashing a peace sign in front of the Statue of Liberty had sold for forty-three hundred dollars.
But the talk of the fair was a “naked” live model (actually, she wore Stringys invisible underpants and Shibue nipple pasties) draped in a diamond-encrusted sheath of sheer chain mail ($125,000). The garment was the creation of Natalia Fedner, who patented its six-way-stretch technology. “I work with Swarovski crystals usually—imagine the upgrade to diamonds!” she said. Fedner was wearing a slinky copper shawl of her own design which conducts a wearer’s body heat. No word on whether it turns green in the rain.
Back at Waterhouse’s Modern Fine Art booth, the statue had not sold. “A couple of people have asked whether it would fit in their home, so we obviously gave them measurements and so forth,” the gallerist said. “One person’s thinking of putting it in their back garden.” He mentioned that there was also interest in an Elaine de Kooning painting; it depicted the Knicks beating the Celtics at another garden (Madison Square), in 1981.
A non-art booth at the fair stood out: Lumnen Laser by Avologi, an anti-aging technology “to treat sagging, volume loss, plumpness and more,” which a flyer claimed was endorsed by Barry C. Barish, “2017 Nobel prize laureate in physics on the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory.” This didn’t seem like something that the Statue of Liberty would need. The cost? $18,750. A sign read “NO Refunds.” ♦