After a furious last-minute bidding war, the weeklong dinosaur head auction ended with Karen Zink writing a $5,000 check to Durango Arts Center, and, fittingly, another mystery.
Once Studio & declared Zink – who bid $3,500 on behalf of “anonymous bidder 1” – the victor at 5 p.m. sharp, Zink laughed.
“I have an announcement,” Zink said. “We will reveal the identity of ‘anonymous bidder 1,’ who’s about to have his 65th birthday, at a public event Jan. 2, where the public will still be able to see the dinosaur head,” she said.
Even as competing bids – which flooded in via telephone up to the wire – pushed the asking price from $2,000 to $3,500 in little more than 15 minutes, Zink said she was never nervous she’d lose.
“My budget was $5,000. So I’ll write the Durango Arts Center a check for that,” Zink said.
DAC’s Executive Director Cristie Scott and Education Director Sandra Butler were thrilled. The money will go to art education and scholarships at the arts center.
“We’re just so grateful,” Scott said.
“Grateful!” said Butler.
The sale brings an at least temporary conclusion to an art-crime saga that has by turns enraptured, enlivened and enraged Durango’s aesthetically ever-skeptical residents.
It’s also a local art-world fable from which it’s possible to draw only one moral conclusion: For creative types, crime does pay.
On Halloween, the dinosaur head made its unabashed debut at no charge to the public atop the Arc of History – a controversial $28,000 municipal artwork at the U.S. Highway 550/160 intersection that involves many rocks being speared by an enormous metal thingamabob.
Though police warned that the addition of the dinosaur head to the Arc of History likely amounted to the unlawful desecration of public property, locals defended the crime as an improvement, nicknaming the sculpture “Jurassic Arc” and lobbying the city of Durango to make the dinosaur head a permanent installation.
Yet before police could identify, let alone locate, whoever had mounted the dinosaur head atop the arc, the tragicomedy took another turn for the delinquent.
On the Monday after Halloween, a band of teenage corsairs ransacked the sculpture, carrying off the dinosaur head in their gold escape vehicle. While the public, apoplectic at the disappearance of the dinosaur head, demanded its speedy return – with some even urging city councilors to negotiate with whomever held the dinosaur head hostage – the wanton youths celebrated their lawlessness.
That afternoon, one of the high school highway robbers even paraded about a driveway in front of his fellow outlaws, wearing the dinosaur head like a hat, as immortalized in photos that one of the brazen kinder-kidnappers triumphantly sent to the Herald.
But conscience caught up to them.
They surrendered the dinosaur head to police Nov. 4, where, for days, it languished in the evidence room like a prehistoric fossil in amber, as officers labored to uncover the provenance of the “hot” artwork.
Finally, according to police, on Nov. 10, someone called “Benjamin Foisel” successfully claimed to be the dinosaur head’s owner and creator.
When Studio & subsequently announced it was auctioning off the liberated dinosaur head for charity, many despaired.
On the Herald’s website, Deb Nielsen wrote, “the dino head made sense of the statute finally – it looked like it belonged there!”
Zink said $3,500 – and even $5,000 – was a small price to pay for the dinosaur head.
“It’s been terrific community fun,” she said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
