Monetarily Monumental

 Monetarily Monumental

    During the past 2 weeks in class, we've placed an immense focus on monuments and memorials. Specifically the intricate and difficult process of creating a monument or memorial, especially in terms of making it impactful or emotionally resonant. Factors like location, material, design, geography, accessibility and more have all been brought up throughout the past 2 weeks as continuous challenges to making a successful memorial/monument.

    However, once the challenges of monument/memorial making were brought up, I started thinking about other challenges to making monuments/memorials that we would either cover later during the week or would just not cover in class. My mind instantly went to probably the most obvious logistical factor in making a monument or memorial, the budget. And while there's still a chance that we'll cover the budget of a memorial/monument in class next week, I have the tingling feeling that we won't. As such, I think it's a perfect topic to cover for my blog post this week since I probably won't get to explore it in class.

    After doing a bit of research, the average upright headstone alone can be anywhere from $720-$5000 and those are just basic headstones like these: 

    Much bigger memorials/monuments like a life-sized marble statue or a bronze statue can cost anywhere from $1,500-$6,000 for a marble statue to $4,000-$10,000 for a bronze statue. And these sorts of memorials are already expensive, but they're usually kept for locally important people and aren't used for the huge monuments. Looking at some of the most famous monuments or memorials that we've covered in class, the price difference is beyond astronomical. Mount Rushmore cost about $1,000,000 to make, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial cost about $26,000,000 to make, the Washington Monument which is literally just a tower cost nearly $46,000,000 to make, and the 9/11 Memorial cost over $1,000,000,000 to make!

    The cost of these monuments or memorials gets increasingly insane as their scale and scope increases as well, and when having to make monuments that will be seen by millions and matter to an entire nation or perhaps the entire world, the challenge of making a monument is not just limited to material or location, but also how to best use so much money and manage it all into a successful monument or memorial. While we have been focusing on important challenges of monument making in class like location, material, and accessibility, I'm a bit shocked such an important factor in monument making like the budget wasn't covered in our past 2 weeks. Especially considering the challenge a budget specifically presents in memorial creation, specifically in large memorials. Most people probably won't ever have control over millions of dollars at a single point in their lives, and yet artisans are expected to somehow manage huge swathes of money to afford and build a successful monument. And this isn't even mentioning the fact that the budget of a monument also impacts and controls other more practical and logistical challenges in making a monument, like manpower, production time, and marketing. But those factors and their impact on making a monument/memorial is for another time.