A New York-based sculptor is furious after spending $100,000 of his own money on a life-size statue of Charlie Kirk, only to find nobody wants to buy it.
Sergio Furnari hoped the statue of the slain far-right activist, which he hoped to see erected in Times Square, would raise “millions.” Instead, he has been flooded with messages from people threatening to urinate on it. He also broke his foot tripping over tape in his studio.
“Is it cursed? Maybe. I don’t know,” he told The Guardian.
Furnari, an Italian artist, had hoped wealthy donors would step up to cover his $100,000 in materials and labor. But none did, and his fundraiser—which aimed to raise $150,000—has crawled to under $8,000.
“I was thinking that it was going to resonate with the world, with whoever, but man, people are strange out there,” he said. “Meaning like, nobody is really coming up with support, especially financial support. So far I’ve spent all my money on this.”
Furnari said he built the statue to “glorify and to exercise the First Amendment,” but he also cited supporting Kirk’s widow, Erika, and wanting to “commemorate a person.”
Even so, Furnari noted that he wasn’t even actually a fan of Kirk’s political views, particularly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he said. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine.”
His statue’s flop comes as Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, has appeared in a Utah courtroom for preliminary hearings.
The 23-year-old has been charged with aggravated murder, felony use of a firearm, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and committing a violent act in the presence of a child.
The hearings were attended by Erika, who took over as CEO of his right-wing Turning Point USA organization after her husband’s death, and the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., whose mind appears to already be made up about the case.
“Based on everything that I saw in that courtroom, it’s very clear to me that Tyler Robinson did this,” Trump Jr. said on Fox News last week.
He added, “The biggest question in my mind at this point is not whether Tyler Robinson did this, or if it was some people from a foreign land, or another planet—it was: why were there only six police officers active at a major event on a university campus?”
