Italian immigrant, Sergio Furnari, wasted $100k of his own money to create a life-size sculpture of the dead Nazi, Charlie Kirk. Instead of raising millions of dollars the artist anticipated, he now has a big, costly problem: No one wants to buy it. Instead, he has received messages from people stating they intend to pee on it once it is displayed in Times Square. Not only did the artist sell his NY apartment to fund his disastrous plan, he broke a foot while working on the statue after tripping over a roll of tape in his studio.
“Is it cursed? Maybe. I don’t know. I was thinking that it was going to resonate with the world, with whoever, but man, people are strange out there,” Furnari said. “Meaning like, nobody is really coming up with support, especially financial support. So far I’ve spent all my money on this.”
“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he told the Guardian. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine. [Kirk would say]: ‘Oh no, Palestine doesn’t exist.’ I thought: ‘Well, this guy must be out of his mind.’”
In desperation, Furnari set up an online fundraising campaign, hoping to raise an initial $150,000, but potentially millions of dollars, which he said would allow him to take the statue on tour. As of Thursday, he had raised $1,400.