A WESTERN Sydney company has offered to build Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s giant upside-down milk crate artwork for a fifth of the $2.5 million set aside to pay for it.

“I am obviously in the wrong business. I should have been an artist,” said David Love, operations manager at Craft Fibreglass Composites in Wetherill Park.

Sydney City Council has set aside $1.7 million for ­Egyptian-born, Sydney-based artist Hany Armanious to design, build and install the 15m tall crate in Belmore Park near Central Station. A further $800,000 has been set aside for “project management”.

Mr Love said he could produce the giant crate from fibreglass cladding over a steel frame for just $500,000.

media_camera Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and the City of Sydney have copped criticism over their public artwork proposals. Picture: City Centre Public Art — Pavilion, by Hany Armanious

“The cost is in the tooling but there is a lot of repetition in a milk crate,” he said.

“We could build it in sections, transport it on a low loader and assemble it on a concrete base at the site.

“The artist is getting five times as much money to produce exactly the same thing — it’s a huge mark-up.

“But you know what artists are like, they sit around all day waiting for a commission while people like us are out making things,” said Mr Love, who has previously produced the medal podiums for the Sydney Olympics and more than 50 giant fibreglass koalas for a nature trail in Port Macquarie.

The planned artwork has sparked controversy, with Melbourne artist Jarrad Kennedy claiming he was the first to come up with the idea of turning a giant milk crate into art. His brown, 3m-tall sculpture was built in a Melbourne park in 2005.

media_camera David Love’s costing estimate to build a giant milk crate sculpture.

“If the artist’s intellectual copyright is already gone there would be nothing to stop us making more,” said Mr Love, with a keen eye on the business opportunities.

“Once we have made the moulds we could knock them out for any city in the world that wanted one.’’

But such a practical, no-nonsense approach to the project was greeted with horror at the City of Sydney. When presented with a $2 million saving for producing exactly the same thing, a flabbergasted press officer stammered: “But this is an artist who is going to build an artwork!”

A City of Sydney spokeswoman later said: “The City is commissioning an original piece of art by one of Australia’s most high-calibre artists. The City’s evaluation panel, made up of experts, unanimously selected the artwork.”

Mr Love was unimpressed: “I could knock out a giant wheelie bin for even less.’’