On Monday, the board of trustees in Celoron, N.Y., the village that had been the reluctant home of “Scary Lucy,” voted unanimously to allow the National Comedy Center to display this notorious statue after it opens next year in nearby Jamestown, N.Y.Previously blogged here.
May 11, 2015
Relocating the unloved Lucy statue.
The NYT reports:
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26 comments:
May I recommend the Storm King Home for Ugly Art? Ok that's not it's real name, but that does seem to be the function of Storm King Art Center. It's not that far away either. Just off the Thruway, conveniently right near the end of I-86.
They should rename the statue Bull Dyke Lucy with the Pauly Walnuts "angle wings" hair.
Then Mark Halperin will pick it up for his next interview with Ted Cruz.
I see a theme here! "Unloved Lucy statue" posted right after "Mark Halperin wants to know why Ted Cruz doesn't talk like Desi Arnez and play the bongo drums."
Her lips could be fixed with one of these, available through the Amazon Portal, post haste.
"You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille." Lack of comma improves the meaning. -CP
Have they executed the sculptor yet?
If not, why the delay?
If ever a statue needed relocating ...
Send it to Cuba as a 'good will' gesture.
Jamestown is the birthplace of Roger Goodell. How about a Tom Brady statute to replace Lucy?
lemondog -- via B-2.
They should send the statue to Martin Sheen's house; there's a definite resemblance to when he's emoting.
I was a great fan of the show I Love Lucy from a young age but was never fond of the Lucy Ricardo character.
I found her childish, devious, occasionally selfish, and willing to lie at the drop of a hat. When I was a child I couldn't grasp why someone as cool as Ricky would want to be married to anyone who acted like her. Ditto Fred and Ethel who, like Ricky, were likeable, even interesting people that you wanted to frequent.
Breakfastpunguy wrote: If ever a statue needed relocating ...
If ever a statue needed repurposing ... (FIFY)
Bronze makes good boat propellers. Bronze washers are indispensable in some applications.
This sad incident illustrates one of Quaestor's fundamental principles: Only autocracies possess reliable taste. When it comes to matters of art representative governments are philistine fuckups. The only way to guarantee an enlightened aesthetic in matters of public art is to mandate that the committee members who commission the objet pay for it from their own pockets. Had the city fathers of Celoron ponied up the cash themselves the Lucille statue wouldn't need to repurposed.
Looking at the photo of the statue, my first reaction was, "Who knew that Lucille Ball was a black woman?"
Skeptical Voter, she went a bit heavy on the bronzer, as you can see.
OK, so it's not the Australopithecine Lucy or the Peanuts Lucy.
Scrap bronze is going for $0.33/lb. these days. Just sayin'...
Oh, whatever.
Some shit is less hard then you think.
Nothing to fear... Joe Biden is here
1) No correction needed in my 1:06.
2) As much as I am and always have been a great, dogged, committed follower of links, there are (as there have been) times when I flat-out take a pass on doing that.
This is one.
Big Mike said...
I see a theme here! "Unloved Lucy statue" posted right after "Mark Halperin wants to know why Ted Cruz doesn't talk like Desi Arnez and play the bongo drums."
Ever see Desi and Ted in the same room together? Thought not.
kzookitty
Scrap bronze is going for $0.33/lb. these days. Just sayin'...
This comment really piqued my curiosity, which I suppose is one metric of a good blog comment -- better than the garden variety bon mot that's a staple at chez Althouse, and much superior to the turgid insults commenters trade on sites like ThinkProgress.
33 cents a pound seemed to me rather cheap for scrap bronze, considering that bronze is about 90% copper, and scrap copper is sufficiently valuable to encourage wide-spread theft and pilferage. Scrap prices vary considerably depending on the form the metal is in before being reclaimed. According to scrapregister.com, the go-to source for scrap values in the United States, bare bright copper (i.e. Cu > 99%) is worth about $2.72 per pound, whereas electric motors scrapped for copper are worth only 26 cents per pound. Given that reclaiming the copper content from scrap bronze must involve considerable energy expenditure a scrap value of 33 cents per pound might be reasonable. Scrapregister.com doesn't even track bronze, so the demand for that once vital alloy must be marginal.
The cheapness of modern bronze got me thinking about the value of bronze in the Bronze Age, when every practical use of metal involved bronze. Gold was undoubtedly the first metal known to mankind, mainly because it's the only metal likely to be encountered in a metallic state in nature, just lying around, so to speak. Gold made for pretty ornaments, but it took some time before it acquired real prestige. In Neolithic times it was copper, the second known metal, that really carried social significance. Malachite, a rich copper ore, was valued and traded for its lovely green color and swirling patterns, long before copper itself was discovered. It doesn't take temperatures much higher than the average campfire to refine metallic copper from malachite, so it's easy to imagine a scenario leading to copper's accidental discovery around 5000 BC. Unfortunately for those early smiths refining copper from malachite involves the release of toxic gases. The mysterious appearance of metal from stone via the medium of fire, and a concomitant manifestation of mysterious illness and death must have imbued copper artifacts with a considerable spiritual potency. Copper became the emblem of rulership, while gold was just adornment.
Copper is fairly common, and copper-bearing ore is easy to spot due to it color. Tin, however, is downright scarce, and refining tin isn't straightforward. How tin was discovered is a real puzzle. Nevertheless the powerful marriage of copper and tin was discovered almost simultaneously in the Near East and the Far East sometime around 3300 BC. Everybody needed bronze, but not everybody had the tin to make it, therefore the first truly international economy developed around the tin trade. It was the Phoenicians who dominated tin, the world's first strategic material. They discovered trade routes to remote sources of tin in far-flung places like southern Spain and even ancient Britain, which they jealously guarded. To reach the tin mines of Western Europe the Phoenicians developed a chain of way station colonies along the coasts of the Mediterranean, one of which, Carthage, became even more powerful and wealthy than the mother country. Scholars have estimated that a trading expedition from the Levant to the tin harbors of ancient Britain and back again took as long as five years to complete. Tin was valuable.
The question of what to do with the statue of Lucy brings to mind the fate of another bronze folly. In 280 BC the immensely rich Hellenistic city state of Rhodes built a huge image of the god Helios, known to us as the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders. Like its modern counterpart, the Statue of Liberty, the Colossus stood at the entrance of the principal Rhodian harbor, and also like Miss Liberty, Helios wasn't solid -- it had an internal weight-bearing skeleton. The outer skin was made of sheet bronze hammered into shape over sculpted limestone forms. The Colossus used so much bronze that its construction drove the price of tin in the Hellenistic East to unprecedented heights. The monument was totally wrecked by an earthquake in 226 BC, a scant fifty years after its dedication. The scrap from that artistic disaster was sold at rock-bottom prices to help restore the quake-ravaged city. It is said the price of tin has never recovered from the fall of the Colossus.
You may worry about the waste of bronze, but I am happy that these guys are not using their "welding skills" on stuff my life depends on.
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