''The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'' is an artwork created in 1991 by
Damien Hirst
Damien Steven Hirst (; né
Brennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, 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 Kingd ...
, an English artist and a leading member of the "
Young British Artists
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 Goldsm ...
" (or YBA). It consists of a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel
display case
A display case (also called showcase, display cabinet, shadow box, or vitrine) is a cabinet with one or often more transparent tempered glass (or plastic, normally acrylic for strength) surfaces, used to display objects for viewing. A display c ...
. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi (; ar, تشارلز ساعتجي; born 9 June 1943) 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 a ...
, who sold it in 2004 to
Steven A. Cohen
Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since September 14, 2020, owning roughly 97.2% of the team. He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Manageme ...
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 tiger shark, it was replaced with a new specimen in 2006. It was on loan to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
in New York City from 2007 to 2010.
It is considered an iconic work of British art in the 1990s,
[Brooks, Richard]
"Hirst's shark is sold to America"
''The Sunday Times
''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...
'', 16 January 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2008. and has become a symbol of Britart worldwide.
[Davies, Serena]
"Why painting is back in the frame"
''The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was fo ...
'', 8 January 2005. Retrieved 27 November 2016.
Background and concept
The work was funded by
Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi (; ar, تشارلز ساعتجي; born 9 June 1943) 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 a ...
, who in 1991 had offered to pay for whatever artwork Hirst wanted to create. The shark itself cost Hirst
£6,000
and the total cost of the work was £50,000.
["Saatchi mulls £6.25m shark offer"]
BBC. Retrieved 23 February 2007 The shark was caught off
Hervey Bay
Hervey Bay () is a city on the coast of the Fraser Coast Region of Queensland, Australia. The city is situated approximately or 3½ hours' highway drive north of the state capital, Brisbane. It is located on the Hervey Bay (Queensland), bay of ...
in Queensland, Australia, by a fisherman commissioned to do so.
Hirst wanted something "big enough to eat you".
[Barber, Lyn]
"Bleeding art"
''The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...
'', 20 April 2003. Retrieved 1 September 2007.
It was first exhibited in 1992 in the first of a series of ''Young British Artists'' shows at the
Saatchi Gallery
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 D ...
, then at its premises in
St John's Wood
St John's Wood is a district in the City of Westminster, London, lying 2.5 miles (4 km) northwest of Charing Cross. Traditionally the northern part of the ancient parish and Metropolitan Borough of Marylebone, it extends east to west from ...
, north London. The British tabloid newspaper ''
The Sun'' ran a story titled "£50,000 for fish without chips."
[Vogel, Caro]
"Swimming with famous dead sharks,2
''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', 1 October 2006. Retrieved 23 February 2007 The show also included Hirst's artwork ''A Thousand Years''. He was then nominated for the
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible (this restriction was removed for the 2017 award) ...
, but it was awarded to
Grenville Davey
Grenville Davey (28 April 1961 – 28 February 2022) was a British sculptor and winner of the 1992 Turner Prize.
Davey was a visiting professor of the University of the Arts London and programme leader, MA Fine Art at the University of Eas ...
. Saatchi sold the work in 2004 to
Steven A. Cohen
Steven A. Cohen (born June 11, 1956) is an American hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball since September 14, 2020, owning roughly 97.2% of the team. He is the founder of hedge fund Point72 Asset Manageme ...
for an estimated $8 million.
[
Its technical specifications are: "Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213 cm."
'']The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' 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.
Decay and replacement
Because the shark was initially preserved poorly, it began to deteriorate, and the surrounding liquid grew murky. Hirst attributed some of the decay to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery
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 D ...
had added bleach to the fluid. In 1993 the gallery skinned the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglass
Fiberglass (American English) or fibreglass (Commonwealth English) is a common type of fiber-reinforced plastic using glass fiber. The fibers may be randomly arranged, flattened into a sheet called a chopped strand mat, or woven into glass cloth ...
mould, thus transforming the shark from a chemically preserved intact carcass to a taxidermy mount being displayed in fluid. Hirst commented, "It didn't look as frightening ... You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight."
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). 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. In 2006, Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at London's Natural History Museum
A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. ...
, assisted with the preservation of the new specimen. This involved injecting formaldehyde into the body, as well as soaking it for two weeks in a bath of 7% formalin
Formaldehyde ( , ) (systematic name methanal) is a naturally occurring organic compound with the formula and structure . The pure compound is a pungent, colourless gas that polymerises spontaneously into paraformaldehyde (refer to section Fo ...
solution. The original 1991 vitrine was then used to house it.
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
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
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.
Variants
Hirst has made other works subsequently which also feature a preserved shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine: ''The Immortal'' (a great white shark, 2005), ''Wrath of God'' (2005), ''Death Explained'' (the shark is split in two, lengthwise, 2007), ''Death Denied'' (2008),''The Kingdom'' (2008) and Leviathan (a basking shark, 201
In September 2008, ''The Kingdom'', a tiger shark, sold at Hirst's Sotheby's
Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and ...
auction, ''Beautiful Inside My Head Forever'', for £9.6 million (more than £3 million above its estimate).[Akbar, Arifa]
"A formaldehyde frenzy as buyers snap up Hirst works"
''The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...
'', 16 September 2008. Retrieved 16 September 2008.
Hirst has made a miniature version of ''The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'' for the Miniature Museum The Miniature Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was founded by Ria and Lex Daniels in 1990. It was initially located at the AMC hospital in Amsterdam, but moved to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2013, where it was on a long-term loan for five year ...
in the Netherlands. In this case, he put a guppy
The guppy (), also known as millionfish and rainbow fish, is one of the world's most widely distributed tropical fish and one of the most popular freshwater aquarium fish species. It is a member of the family Poeciliidae and, like almost all ...
in a box (10 × 3.5 × 5 centimetres) filled with formaldehyde.
He also presented a number of other animals preserved in formaldehyde, including: a cow and a calf (''Mother and Child (Divided')''), a sheep (''Away from the Flock''), an 18-month old calf with the disk of the Egyptian goddess Hathor between its 18-carat gold horns (''The Golden Calf''), and a dove in flight (''The Incomplete Truth'').
Responses
In 2003, under the title ''A Dead Shark Isn't Art'', the Stuckism International Gallery
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 ...
exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch
Shoreditch is a district in the East End of London in England, and forms the southern part of the London Borough of Hackney. Neighbouring parts of Tower Hamlets are also perceived as part of the area.
In the 16th century, Shoreditch was an impor ...
(London) shop, JD Electrical Supplies. The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.["A Dead Shark Isn't Art" on the Stuckism International web site](_blank)
Retrieved 21 September 2008
In a speech at the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its pur ...
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".
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 one of Hirst's pieces at 913,450, including animals and insects.
The 2009 British-Hungarian film ''The Nutcracker in 3D
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
'' features a scene in which a pet shark is electrocuted in a water tank, which director Andrei Konchalovsky
Andrei Sergeyevich Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (russian: link=no, Андрей Сергеевич Михалков-Кончаловский; born 20 August 1937) is a Russian filmmaker. He has worked in Soviet, Hollywood, and contemporary Russian ...
cites as a reference to Hirst's artwork.[Zeitchik, Steven]
"Andrei Konchalovsky builds a strange maze with ''The Nutcracker in 3D''"
''Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'', 26 November 2010. Retrieved 3 December 2016.
Hirst's response to those who said that anyone could have done this artwork was, "But you didn't, did you?"
Notes and references
External links
Official Damien Hirst website
video, Beth Harris, Sal Khan
Salman Amin Khan (born October 11, 1976), commonly known as Sal Khan, is an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, a free online non-profit educational platform and an organization with which he has produced over 6,500 vi ...
and Steven Zucker commentators, 7:49
{{DEFAULTSORT:Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The
1991 sculptures
Works by Damien Hirst
Sharks in art
English contemporary works of art
Taxidermy art
1991 in England
English sculpture