The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists" (or YBA). It consists of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formalin in a glass-panel display case.
It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million. However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.
Owing to deterioration of the original 14-foot (4.3m) tiger shark, it was replaced with a new specimen in 2006. It was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 2007 to 2010.[1]
It is considered an iconic work of British art in the 1990s,[2] and has become a symbol of Britart worldwide.[3]
Background and concept
The work was funded by the businessman Charles Saatchi, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create. The shark cost Hirst £6,000[4] and the total cost of the work was £50,000.[5] Hirst asked Doris Lockhart for a loan to cover the cost of shipping the shark from Australia, but she gave him the required amount. In return, Hirst invited Lockhart to choose anything she liked from his studio, and she selected a piece called The Only Way is Up.[6] The shark was caught off Hervey Bay in Queensland, Australia, by a fisherman commissioned to do so.[4][5] Hirst wanted something "big enough to eat you".[7]
Death Denied (2008) part of a later artwork, exhibited in Kyiv
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was first exhibited in 1992 in the first of a series of Young British Artists shows at the Saatchi Gallery, then at its premises in St John's Wood, north London. The British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a story titled "£50,000 for fish without chips."[8] The show also included Hirst's artwork A Thousand Years. He was then nominated for the Turner Prize, but it was awarded to Grenville Davey. Saatchi sold the work in 2004 to Steven A. Cohen for an estimated $8 million.[8]
The New York Times in 2007 gave the following description of the artwork:
Mr. Hirst often aims to fry the mind (and misses more than he hits), but he does so by setting up direct, often visceral experiences, of which the shark remains the most outstanding.
In keeping with the piece's title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don't quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank. It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.[1]
Decay and replacement
Because the shark was initially preserved poorly, it began to deteriorate, and the liquid grew murky. Hirst attributed some of the decay to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery had added bleach to the fluid.[8] In 1993, the gallery skinned the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglass mould, thus transforming the shark from a chemically preserved intact carcass to a taxidermy mount displayed in fluid. Hirst commented, "It didn't look as frightening ... You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight."[8]
When Hirst learned of Saatchi's impending sale of the work to Cohen, he offered to replace the shark, an operation which Cohen funded, calling the expense "inconsequential" (the formaldehyde process alone cost around $100,000).[8] Another shark (a female aged about 25–30 years, equivalent to middle age) was caught off the Queensland coast and shipped to Hirst in a 2-month journey.[8] In 2006, Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at London's Natural History Museum, assisted with the preservation of the new specimen.[8] This involved injecting formaldehyde into the body, as well as soaking it for two weeks in a bath of 7% formalin solution.[8] The original 1991 vitrine was then used to house it.[8]
Hirst acknowledged that there was a philosophical question as to whether replacing the shark meant that the result could still be considered the same artwork. He observed:
It's a big dilemma. Artists and conservators have different opinions about what's important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It's the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.[8]
Variants
Hirst has made other works subsequently which also feature a preserved shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine: The Immortal[10] (a great white shark, 2005), Wrath of God[11] (2005), Death Explained[12] (the shark is split in two, lengthwise, 2007), Death Denied[13] (2008), The Kingdom[14] (2008) and Leviathan (a basking shark, 2010).[15]
In September 2008, The Kingdom, a tiger shark, sold at Hirst's Sotheby's auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, for £9.6 million (more than £3 million above its estimate).[16]
Hirst has made a miniature version of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for the Miniature Museum in the Netherlands. In this case, he put a guppy in a box (10 × 3.5 × 5 centimetres) filled with formaldehyde.[17]
He also presented a number of other animals preserved in formaldehyde, including: a cow and a calf (Mother and Child (Divided)[18]), a sheep (Away from the Flock[19]), an 18-month old calf with the disk of the Egyptian goddess Hathor between its 18-carat gold horns (The Golden Calf[20]), and a dove in flight (The Incomplete Truth[21]).
In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch (London) shop, JD Electrical Supplies.[22] The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.[23]
In a speech at the Royal Academy in 2004, art critic Robert Hughes used The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living as a prime example of how the international art market at the time was a "cultural obscenity". Without naming the artwork or the artist, he stated that brush marks in the lace collar of a painting by Velázquez could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames".[24]
Critics have also questioned the ethics of the part of Hirst's oeuvre that involves dead animals. One estimate puts the number of creatures killed for Hirst's pieces at 913,450, including animals and insects.[25]
The 2009 British-Hungarian film The Nutcracker in 3D features a scene in which a pet shark is electrocuted in a water tank, which director Andrei Konchalovsky cites as a reference to Hirst's artwork.[26]
Hirst's response to those who said that anyone could have done this artwork was, "But you didn't, did you?"[7]
↑ Jones, Dylan (2022). "February: Doris's Saatchi Legacy: The Truth About the YBAs". Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That. London: White Rabbit. p.106. ISBN9781474624589. Doris Lockhart: On one of my visits to see Damien, he asked if I could lend him some money, as he said he wanted to pay to get a shark sent from Australia for one of his pieces, and he didn't have the money to get them to ship it. So I said, "Yeah, sure, how much do you need?" And I gave it to him and forgot all about it. I went back maybe a month or so later to see him, and he said, "Oh, you know that money you lent me?" I said, "I didn't lend it to you, Damien, I gave it to you." And he said, "No, no, no, no, I want to pay it back and here it is." I couldn't believe it. He was insisting I take the money and I was so impressed by that. That's one of my fondest memories of that kid, he wasn't getting millions of pounds for his paintings at that time. The thing that makes me laugh is imagining he got the money to pay me back from Charles. I mean, that really would be a good story. But anyway, I wouldn't take it. So, he said, "Okay, look around the studio and if you see something you like, take it, it's yours." Well, I couldn't turn that offer down but I didn't want to pick anything big, because I didn't want to seem greedy and horrible, because his work was starting to make money. So I picked something that I could actually carry away and I have it to this day, a piece called The Only Way is Up. If my place started to burn down, that's what I would take. Yes, I'd get my cat, but I would actually also get the work that Damien gave me.
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art. By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Charles Saatchi is an Iraqi-British businessman and the co-founder, with his brother Maurice, of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business – the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s – until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year, the brothers formed a new agency called M&C Saatchi.
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and began a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
Gavin Turk is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and was considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surrounding the 'myth' of the artist and the 'authorship' of a work of art.
Sensation was an exhibition of the collection of contemporary art owned by Charles Saatchi, including many works by Young British Artists (YBAs), which first took place 18 September – 28 December 1997 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition later toured to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. A proposed showing at the National Gallery of Australia was cancelled when the gallery's director decided the exhibition was "too close to the market."
Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, venue/space or situation. It is in the category of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with Letterist International, Situationist International, Viennese Actionists, the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists. More latterly, intervention art has delivered Guerrilla art, street art plus the Stuckists have made extensive use of it to affect perceptions of artworks they oppose and as a protest against existing interventions.
Adrian Searle is an art critic for The Guardian, and has been writing for the paper since 1996. Previously he was a painter.
Stuckist demonstrations since 2000 have been a key part of the Stuckist art group's activities and have succeeded in giving them a high-profile both in Britain and abroad. Their primary agenda is the promotion of figurative painting and opposition to conceptual art.
Sarah Kent is a British art critic, formerly art editor of the weekly London "what's on" guide Time Out. She was an early supporter of the Young British Artists in general, and Tracey Emin in particular, helping Emin to get exposure. This has led to polarised reactions of praise and opposition for Kent. She adopts a feminist stance and has stated her position to be that of "a spokesperson, especially for women artists, in a country that is essentially hostile to contemporary art."
The Little Artists are John Cake and Darren Neave. They create versions of well known contemporary artworks and art personalities in miniature using toy Lego bricks. They also produce a range of merchandise. They describe themselves as conceptual artists. Their work is collected by Charles Saatchi.
Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today.
Neo-conceptual art describes art practices in the 1980s and particularly 1990s to date that derive from the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These subsequent initiatives have included the Moscow Conceptualists, United States neo-conceptualists such as Sherrie Levine and the Young British Artists, notably Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the United Kingdom.
The Stuckism International Gallery was the gallery of the Stuckist art movement. It was open from 2002 to 2005 in Shoreditch, and was run by Charles Thomson, the co-founder of Stuckism. It was launched by a procession carrying a coffin marked "The death of conceptual art" to the neighbouring White Cube gallery.
For the Love of God is a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst produced in 2007. It consists of a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the Skull Star Diamond. The skull's teeth are original, and were purchased by Hirst in London. The artwork is a memento mori, or reminder of the mortality of the viewer.
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), also known as The Tent, was an artwork by Tracey Emin. The work was a tent with the appliquéd names of, literally, everyone she had ever slept with. It achieved iconic status and was owned by Charles Saatchi. Since its destruction in the 2004 Momart London warehouse fire, Emin has refused to recreate the piece.
Boo Saville is a contemporary artist.
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was a two-day auction of new work at Sotheby's, London, taking place on 15 and 16 September 2008. It was unusual as Damien Hirst bypassed galleries and sold directly to the public. The sale raised £111 million for 218 items. The auction exceeded expectations, setting a record for a single-artist auction, occurring as the financial markets plunged.
Cartrain, often stylised cartяain, is a British artist associated with the graffiti urban art movement.
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