Sculptures, Googly Eyes, In-Person Inspection and USPAP
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Wednesday, January 22, 2025 in Ask an Instructor, Fine Art
Back in December, some pranksters put googly eyes on public sculptures in Bend, Oregon. Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” called it “lighthearted vandalism” while others were concerned about potential damage to the art. “Oh, come on, you’re gonna get mad about that?” Colbert said, “It’s fun, and frankly, it’s safer. If Bambi’s mom had had those eyes, maybe she’d have seen that hunter coming.”
The City of Bend has an active program to engage its residence in public art projects. Its partnership with the Art in Public Places program is currently seeking designs for three structures: a bike shelter, a trash enclosure and a central utility plant enclosure on the Public Works campus in Bend. The proposal states, “The artist(s) will design inspired 2D graphic art to be laser cut onto rusted Corten metal panels that will serve as the exterior cladding for the three structures. The artist(s) will provide digital files for the work of art to be used by a local metal fabricator to laser-cut the design onto the flat Corten metal panels. The panels will then be installed onto the structures.”
From a conservation perspective, what if someone put googly eyes on these new panels? A signature trait of Corten metal panels is that they weather and age over time: the patina becomes part of the visual appeal. Corten Steel was designed to eliminate the need for painting and when exposed to the elements develops a rusted appearance in just a few months. Any adhesive – even simple Scotch tape – could affect the uniformity of the patina. Applied googly eyes could impact painted surfaces, an applied or natural patina on a bronze, and create future conservation issues by breaking the integrity of a surface and allow for water penetration.
When you’re working on a project that requires a USPAP-compliant report, the appraiser’s certification is an essential part that allows an intended user to understand how you complied with USPAP. A part of this certification asks you to state whether you have (or have not) made an in-person inspection of the property that you’ve been asked to appraise as part of the scope of work for the assignment.
Let’s say you were asked to appraise Bend, Oregon’s public sculptures in March 2022 where you visited them in person, making notes on their condition. You were then asked to appraise them again as of December 2024, but did not visit them, instead relying on your notes from the March 2022 visit.
Did you do an “in-person” inspection for the December 2024 project? No, because your March 2022 in-person inspection was part of a different assignment.
Could you use an extraordinary assumption to assume that the condition was unchanged from the March 2022 site visit? To use this assignment condition, you must have a reasonable reason to believe that you could obtain credible assignment results if you use an extraordinary assumption. With the rampant spate of googly eyes being attached to public sculptures in Bend, Oregon, it is likely that the condition might have changed for at least some of the sculptures, making it unreasonable to assume that the condition of the public sculptures would have stayed the same between March 2022 and the December 2024 assignments. As such, you’d want to make sure that you understood the current condition, via an in-person inspection, of the sculptures as of the December 2024 assignment, since the condition is an important element of the value of outdoor, public art.
Now, what if you, from your office, controlled a drone and used live video footage to assess the condition of the sculptures, or had a city administrator walk around the sculptures on a Zoom or Facetime call that you viewed from your office – would that constitute a “personal inspection” under USPAP?
The answer is still no. FAQ 220 in the 2024 USPAP Frequently Asked Questions addresses this and states, “Drones are tools that can be used to amplify vision like binoculars or a jeweler’s loupe,” explaining that drones can be a critical tool in an assignment. However, “just as viewing photographs of a house does not constitute a personal inspection by the appraiser, neither does viewing live streaming or recordings of aerial photography.” Personal inspection means just that – that an appraiser must have physically visited the subject party as part of the assignment.