Lazaro Rodriguez Turned Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Into a $33,000 Lamp

The Kareem Lamp is 76 inches tall. It contains resin, electrical wiring, a light bulb, and metal. It costs $33,000. There is one of it. This is not conceptual art. It turns on. ## Lazaro Rodriguez, Born 1995, Miami Rodriguez was born in Miami in 1995 and trained in the tradition of sculptural art that takes the body seriously as material. The Lamp Series is described by the artist as a satirical exploration of fame, idol worship, and the domestic consumption of cultural icons. The framing is important: not celebration, not critique, but something more specific. The word Rodriguez uses is "domestic consumption." The lamp does not exist in a gallery on a pedestal. It exists as a functioning household object. You plug it in. The icon illuminates the room. This is the sharpest version of the question the series is asking: what happens to a cultural icon when you bring them home? Not as a poster, not as a jersey, but as the primary light source in your living room? ## Kareem at 76 Inches, Hockney at 43 The Kareem Lamp is life-sized at 76 inches, which is accurate. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stood 7 feet 2 inches, making him the NBA's all-time leading scorer with 38,387 points across 20 seasons. A lamp built to his physical scale is not decorative. It is disorienting. The piece forces the viewer to recalibrate the space around it. The Hockney Lamp is 43 inches and priced at $28,000. David Hockney, the British painter best known for his California swimming pool series and his 2018 auction record of $90.3 million for "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)," rendered at 43 inches is a different kind of provocation. Hockney is alive, working, and opinionated about art. The idea that someone is currently building him into a floor lamp is the kind of detail he would find funny and would immediately use in a lecture. ## The Photography Credit and What It Signals The photos in the April 2026 carousel are credited to Alfonso Duran, working under the handle @alfonsodrn. This is not a detail to skip. Rodriguez chose a documentary photographer with a distinct editorial eye to document functional sculpture. The decision to pair sculptural work with editorial photography rather than studio-white-background product photography is a statement about what kind of market this work is aimed at. The art world documents work for auction archives. The editorial world documents work for cultural conversation. Rodriguez chose the latter, which means the Lamp Series is positioned at the intersection of both, a place where a $33,000 sculpture can generate press coverage that reaches people who cannot buy it but will remember it. Fashion runs this play constantly. A Saint Laurent runway piece at $4,500 generates a $40 million advertising impression value because it exists in a visual language that travels. Rodriguez is running the same logic through sculpture. ## $33,000 for One. $28,000 for One. The Edition Size Is the Statement. "1 of 1" appears on both pieces. Not in the sense of scarcity marketing, in the sense of commission. You cannot buy the Kareem Lamp in an edition of 50. There is one. Serious inquiries go directly to the artist. The pricing sits between mid-level contemporary art and high-end collector art. A work by an emerging artist in a commercial gallery in 2026 might list between $8,000 and $25,000. Rodriguez is pricing above that range without gallery representation overhead, which either means he has priced correctly for the demand he has already fielded, or he has priced aspirationally and is willing to wait. Given that the Lamp Series has a functioning website, a professional documentary photographer, and is being surfaced through high-engagement social media channels, the infrastructure suggests the former. ## The Domestic Object as Argument The strongest version of the Lamp Series is this: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA Championships, was named MVP six times, and converted the skyhook into the most unguardable shot in basketball history. David Hockney painted swimming pools in a way that made California feel eternal and produced work that cleared $90 million at Christie's. Both of these men are now available as floor lamps in someone's home. The question Rodriguez is asking is whether "available as a floor lamp" diminishes them or domesticates fame itself. The answer is probably both, and that tension is exactly where the work lives. The full slideshow is at lazarorodriguez.com. The Kareem Lamp is 76 inches and it is still available.