Agree.
They remind me of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, only less lifelike.
Or if more realistic, as if they’ll suddenly come to life and freak out passersby, like those shock artists who pose as potted shrubbery on city streets.
Depending on your point of view, The Frank Sidebottom statue is about as close to real life as you can get 
The artist of the Einstein statue created a replica and gave it to Georgia Tech, where it sits on campus.
Before it was even unveiled, the students had already named it “Fat Albert!” 
Agreed, and it doesn’t try to bring in the usual martial conventions of the “equestrian statue” style, which would look incongruous. Just a horse and rider going about their business.
Eh, not every horse is hankering to burn up the track with their rider. Especially in the case of a rather chonky rider like Mayor Dizengoff, and a smaller finer-boned horse breed like the Arabian, a considerate equestrian is probably better off just ambling around town.
There’s a statue of Dante Alighieri outside an Italian-American center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Of course, I don’t know what Dante looked like in real life, but the statue is creepy as hell. It looks the way a Mother Superior would look in movies like The Nun. It’s got a severe face and soulless eyes.
I tried to find a good picture to show this, but the photos I’ve dug up online don’t really convey the dread this statue induces. They look almost normal. But, I swear, if you look at the original you know that they encased a doomed soul in it, or something.
This one’s better – you can see that the eyes look abnormal
The Jim Henson statute on the campus of the University of Maryland is smiling and shows teeth. I think it works very well, is a good likeness and captures his personality well.
On campus there is also a statue that is rubbed constantly like Molly Malone statue. This one is less problematic. The original statue of Testudo the Diamondback Terrapin statue is outside the entrance to the main library. It’s tradition to rub its snout for good luck especially before finals. Didn’t work for me. Apparently long after I left there students started leaving offerings during finals. The legend mentioned at the end of the article was alive and well when I was there. If a virgin ever graduated from the school the statute would fly around the quad. Hasn’t happened yet.
The answer to the question, is that they are not normally sculpted by world famous sculptors/ world renowned artists. They are produced by mediocre artists that local communities that commission these pieces can afford.
You get what you pay for.
The horse store was all out of Clydesdales.
$500,000 MLK statue in Florida park disappoints. The disproportionate head, shoes, and arms were intentional, but critics think it looks like a caricature. The mayor says, “Maybe it didn’t come out the way everybody had hoped it would.”
Well, it’s hard to tell what it looks like from ground level - hopefully not quite as out-of-proportion… In other photos, at least his face is recognizable, unlike the Lucy statue in the OP (faint praise indeed).
Could someone summarize the reasons? I’m not turning off my adblocker just to read it.
Nevermind.
The arm is oversized to emphasize the power of the book [bible] he is holding.
The shoes are oversized too emphasize a quote about having big shoes to fill.
The head is oversized too give better visibility from more angles and distances in the park.
Symbolism list in execution - just looks weird.
I’ve visited the Josephine Tussaud Wax Museum in Hot Springs National Park. The park is only an hours drive. I’ve visited the attractions there many times since childhood.
The wax figures are very lifelike. Wax is a pliable sculpture medium. The figures are also clothed and wear jewelry similar to the real person.
Others have pointed out that bronze is more difficult to sculpt and even the clothing has to be sculpted. A jacket in bronze looks different.
This reminded me of the Sybil Ludington statue. The artist captured in bronze a great expression of her yelling while riding; her face shows a heroic combination of energy, determination, and fatigue. Her hair looks wet and plastered to her skull as though she’s riding in the rain. She’s an example of how tricky bronze can be: even though the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington did a good job, the uneven oxidation on Sybil’s face changes what was a dynamic action pose into something scary.
He looks like a bobble head.
Execution is everything. I’ve bought a few t-shirts that have a theme I liked, but they weren’t good t-shirts because the execution didn’t work.
Sculpture is challenging. In this case, I thought the clay model for the bronze looked better than the finished product, even if it had the same underlying form.
I would be interested to know if there are any artists who have created more than a half dozen decent non-abstract figurative bronze sculptures. ISTM that they need to dial back the creativity and focus on the fundamentals.
Andy Edwards (mentioned above in relation to the Beatles and Lemmy) is one, for starters. [also]
While very naturalistic, they usually convey a powerful sense of their subject.
Well, Auguste Rodin you can count up the bronze figures. The Kiss and The Thinker are more famous, but The Burghers of Calais is perhaps most powerful. Then there are figures of The Age of Bronze, St. John The Baptist Preaching, and Balzac. The Burghers of Calais is six figures on its own, so much more than six over his career.
Robert Graham, best known outside the art world as the late husband of Angelica Huston, could work bronze like it was butter. But he didn’t do much formal portraiture. In fact, probably his least well-received work was the giant suspended forearm and fist in Detroit commemorating boxer Joe Louis.
Rodin is awesome, worth a mention, and I highly recommend Musee Rodin’s sculpture garden in Paris, but I had living artists in mind, the kind that could still be commissioned by a proud and ambitious community.