In mid-February, Ms. Whitehead, 54, and Mr. Elniski, 56, gave this reporter a tour of their new residence in the West Town neighborhood here, leading the way up a spiral staircase into a modest office. Sliding doors opened onto a wintry rooftop scene, where two silver corkscrews mounted on tall poles twirled lazily in eddies of wind. “I think of them as the new Brancusis,” said Ms. Whitehead, an artist with thick, tousled hair that brings to mind a shorn field in a crazy wind.
Though Ms. Whitehead and Mr. Elniski, who is also an artist, spent $40,000 last year to buy and install the wind turbines (wildly expensive retrofits and mishaps included), they estimate that they will probably save only about $500 annually in energy costs, making the payback period 80 years, a point almost certainly beyond the end of their lives. Still, there are other, more critical economies to consider, Ms. Whitehead said, like the carbon economy. “We could have bought two new cars for the same money,” she said, “but we’d rather have these.”
Oh, excuse me, it's a "conceptual art project" that's "not yet a recognizable genre". Well, for now let's just call it The Green Period.
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