Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Stuff about Things: An Art History Podcast
Episode 40: Damien Hirst - A Shark's Tale
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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, which is, you guessed it, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay Howdy. I have my PhD in art history and a startling lack of hobbies, which is how this whole podcast thing got started. And six years later, you still can't get rid of me. Thank you for joining me for episode 40. Those of you who listened to the last episode on the Moai of Rapa Nui and stuck it out through the end, for which I both applaud and appreciate you, you'll know that this episode has been in the works for some time. I started writing it l over two and a half years ago, I think, October of 2021. And I've picked it up once or twice since then, but it inevitably always goes back into the graveyard file, which is the file where partially written episodes go to die. The majority of topics that I abandon so heartlessly to the graveyard file are typically because I got bored with them, that's a big one, or I wanted to release them around a certain time and knew that they wouldn't be finished in that time, and so I shelved them in the hopes that another time rolls around, which is what happened with the episode on spirit photography. The topic of today's episode, though, I think is the only topic that I ever had to shelve because it messed with my mind. Because it made me think a lot about death. And while I'm usually fine with that, I mean it scares the crap out of me, but I can usually engage in conversations about it. I started writing this episode at a time when I was feeling a little fragile. And in spending hours and hours and hours reading about a work that deals with the concept of death, I started ruminating on the concept a little too much. Q, Uno Reverse Card, to the graveyard, yeah. I did, however, still have some semblance of humor about me, uh, because I wrote the following line in the earliest version of this script. So I would have written this in October of 2021. And no, I don't usually quote myself on the podcast, but I thought this one was pretty good. For context, this was around the time I was finishing my dissertation. Past Me wrote, quote, You would think that finishing a PhD would be a relief, but oh no, it is terrifying. And that doesn't pair well with extensive research on sharks' death and formaldehyde. I would instead recommend pairing your existential crisis with a full-bodied red wine. End quote. Flash forward to two and a half years later, and you get me now. Do I still have existential crises on a near-daily basis? Yes. But I persevered because this story is freaking fascinating. But before we get to that, allow me to make a couple of disclaimers. Uh, if you haven't already noticed, this episode does contain ample mentions of death and a lot of dead things. There are also several passages that contain some spicy adult language. I will be bleeping the spiciest of those words. Uh, let's be real, more to avoid an explicit rating than out of concern for your delicate constitutions. But I do know that some of you listen to this stuff with your kids, like in the car and stuff, so just note that it may not be appropriate for all listeners. Disclaimer given, let's get to it. The part where I tell you stuff about the classic trio of Sharks, Death and Formeldehyde, which is to say about contemporary artist Damien Hearst and one of his most famous and infamous works, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, aka The Shark One. The year was 1991. The voice on the other side of the line was British, and the Australian post office manager was suspicious. In the days before the advent of the internet, post offices fielded a lot of strange requests, but few as strange as this one. Surely this was a prank. But the British man on the other line assured the post office manager that it was not. In fact, he was quite serious. And if the post office manager would please excuse him, he had more calls to make. Within weeks, handwritten posters started to appear in the windows of post offices all along the coast of Southern Australia. Two words were in bold. Wanted. Halfway across the world in London, the phone started to ring. And ring and ring and ring. Dozens of people called the number listed on the posters offering their services. The man on the other end of the line listened to their pitches, asked a few questions, and silently categorized their suitability for the job. Good, maybe, slightly possible, idiot, madman. Years later, the man created a more universal category, describing the lot of them as mad fing crazy. He wasn't being rude. If anything, it was something of a compliment, maybe even a recognition of a shared character trait. But these phone calls never yielded an outcome, at least not directly. Instead, in these conversations, one name kept coming up: that of a man who ran a rather niche establishment in Hervey Bay near Queensland. The establishment's name, at least, was promising. It seems that our caller had finally found his man. One who was the absolute epitome of mad f ⁇ ing crazy. There's really no other way to describe Victor Vic Hislop, who spent the majority of the 80s and 90s hunting sharks in a small boat that he named, what else, Jaws. While his boat ran on petrol, Hislop was fueled by a single-minded obsession. For him, hunting sharks wasn't just a job. It was a holy war against creatures that Hislop referred to as God's only mistake. Unfortunately for these alleged mistakes, Vic Hislop was very good at hunting, catching, and killing sharks, sometimes even with his bare hands. When he wasn't actively hunting sharks, Hislop ran the aforementioned Vic Hislop's Shark Show, a local attraction in Hervey Bay that was essentially an anti-shark propaganda machine masquerading as a novelty museum. One of Hislop's favorite way of attracting visitors was to string up his newest catches outside the building, where he would leave them until the sight and the smell of their rotting carcasses started to deter visitors rather than attract them. The best specimens that Hislop caught, however, didn't become fodder for passers by. No, those specimens were destined for Hislop's industrial freezer. That included the great white shark that Hislop caught in 1987. It was that shark that earned Hislop a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, at least for a time, as the largest shark ever caught, clocking in at 21 feet long and over 5,000 pounds. With that particular shark, Hislop did the only sensible thing he could. He loaded it into a very large refrigerated van and took it on the road, creating a traveling exhibition of sorts that stopped in popular tourist towns in southern Australia. To this day, some Australians still recall their parents taking them to see the monster shark, which slowly decomposed in the back of Hislop's van for about 30 years. Needless to say, if one needed a shark, Vic Hislop was the man for the job. At first, the operation to procure the man a shark was touch and go. Hislop thought he'd found the one in the form of a 15-footer that he harpooned in the head, but it wasn't to be. As Hislop towed the dead shark to shore, it effectively became a very large fishing lure, attracting a mess of other, even bigger sharks that had no problem participating in some good old-fashioned cannibalism. Then, one day, the perfect catch presented itself. A large tiger shark that Hislop successfully hunted in the waters of Hervey Bay. Before freezing it, Hislop jammed a plank of wood in its mouth, ensuring it would freeze open, with its jagged teeth on display, the creature looking as hungry in death as it was in life. At fourteen feet long, the shark was exactly what the patron had wanted. Something big enough to eat you. As for what came next, you'll have to keep listening. But I will tell you this: it is a story that has something in common with both Hislop and his shark-seeking patron. It is mad, fing crazy.
SPEAKER_01Please call back.
SPEAKER_00Within two years, the shark that in 1991 was literally chilling in a freezer with a plank between its jaws would enter the collection of a private collector halfway across the world. Not as a fearsome specimen of the deep, at least not primarily, but rather as a work of conceptual art. One that will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the most controversial and polarizing artworks the world has ever known. And no, I'm not exaggerating. That work has the very long title of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Side note, the title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, does not lend itself well to abbreviation. And so I have made the executive decision to use all 11 words when referring to it. It's a little bit awkward, I am aware, but I don't know what else to do. And no, I cannot use the acronym of all of the letters in the title words because that would be typism de. And that is infinitely worse, not just for the ears, but also for the mouth. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is a conceptual art installation that features a 13 to 14-foot taxidermied tiger shark submerged in a formaldehyde solution, all within a glass and steel tank. And its maker is an artist named Damien Hearst. The first thing that I ever learned about Damien Hearst is that he is an artist that people, especially in artsy circles, absolutely love to hate. Then sit back and watch the utter chaos unfold. I knew it wasn't cool to like Damien Hearst before I ever even saw one of his artworks. That is because I once made a comment at such a dinner party about encountering a sculpture by Hearst's contemporary Jeff Koons. I had seen the sculpture in Venice, Italy, so I was feeling, you know, kind of fancy, and I genuinely thought it was super cool. It was this huge, shiny metallic sculpture of a balloon dog, and it was right on the Venetian canal. Now, silly me, I made the mistake of mentioning just how cool I thought this shiny red balloon dog was, only to have several people look at me like I was drunk andor on drugs. And not the good kind. For the record, I was not on drugs andor drunk, but after that conversation, I probably wanted to be. After looking at me like I was absolute scum, one of these individuals stated, Well, at least it wasn't a Damien Hearst. At that point, I was probably in my mid-20s and had enough social awareness to keep my mouth shut and not mention that I had no idea who this Damien Hearst person was. And so from the very first mention of him, I knew that Damien Hearst, like Jeff Koons, apparently, was not cool. So imagine my surprise and slight dismay when I started to look into Damien Hearst's artwork, only to find myself utterly fascinated and captivated by it. And that's not normal for me. So when I do inherently get something or like something abstract, it's a special thing, even if everyone around me says that I'm wrong. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is one of those works. And it is undoubtedly the work that put Damien Hearst on the map. As I just stated, the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is what's known as conceptual art. That is the term that is used to refer to artworks whose concept, whose idea, is the first and most important thing about it. Forgive me, conceptual artists everywhere. I would be astounded if you hadn't turned this off by now, but whatever. Conceptual art tends to be the weird stuff. A signed urinal, a pile of candy, a banana duct taped to a wall, a shark in a tank. Yes, these are all actual examples of conceptual art. Unlike many works of conceptual art, the meaning of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is not shrouded in mystery. Quite the opposite. The concept is given freely to us in the form of the work's title. That is something that Damien Hearst does often. He uses the titles of his works to communicate an essential idea represented by it. That is not to say, though, that there isn't room for speculation or conversation about the quote unquote meaning of the work, because that is in large part up to the viewer to decide for themselves. When we start talking about the concept of this work, is when I start to get the existential sweats, uh, because it is indeed very difficult, dare I say impossible, for someone living to understand the physical realities of death. By definition, if we are dead, we are no longer sentient. Whatever it is that makes us us is no longer present. It has left the building and the body. Where that thing goes has haunted and fascinated human beings for millennia. But that is on the spiritual side of things. Whereas the concept at play here is very specifically about the physical. How do you represent that in material form? For Hearst, the answer was simple. You stick a big old shark in a fancy tank filled with liquid and you put it on display. And you know what? I think you might be onto something. To quote Damien Hearst directly, quote, I like the idea of a thing to describe a feeling. A shark is frightening, bigger than you are, in an environment unknown to you. It looks alive when it's dead, and dead when it's alive. End quote. I think it's safe to gander that most of us are very familiar with sharks. Humans have had a certain kind of fascination with sharks for centuries, if not millennia, but the general collective fear that I think the vast majority of people probably have related to sharks is something far more recent. According to author Sarah Sloat, a fear of shark and shark attacks started to escalate in the early 1900s, particularly in America, because it was around that time that Americans started to spend more time at the beach. The more time people are spending at the beach, the greater the likelihood of a shark attack being reported. Plus, you have to consider that that was the day and age of emerging media, newspapers, probably radio. I don't know, when was radio made? Uy. 1893. We good. The point stands that not only are more people spending time at the beach, causing shark attacks to rise, because you know there's people in the water splashing, having fun, and sharks are like, ooh, that looks tasty. But also there were systems in place via the media to amplify those reports. Shark Mania exploded literally and figuratively in 1975, when Steven Spielberg's classic movie Jaws and its iconic soundtrack, Badum, Badum, took a huge bite out of the box office and the psychological safety of viewers around the world. And inspired a fear of sharks for generations to come. As someone who saw Jaws far too young, I can confirm. Emotional trauma. In more recent decades, sharks have become much better regarded in general, if not by the public, than surely by environmentalists and oceanographers, though the creatures do continue to act as the baddies in countless movies. The Shallows, The Meg, 47 Meters Down, Deep Blue Sea, Finding Nemo, and of course the cinematic uh experience that is the Shark NAT series. Yes, that is a combination of the words Shark and Tornado, which aptly describes the plot or lack thereof of the entire movie franchise. Needless to say, we as a collective find sharks fascinating. All the more so because they scare the crap out of us. Yet, despite that familiarity, how many of us have actually seen a shark in real life? Much less up close and personal in the water? I don't think that many of us. So imagine walking into a contemporary art gallery only to be confronted by not just a large shark, but a hungry-looking one. One frozen in the exact moment of attack, with its jaws open wide, its sharp teeth juxtaposed with the soft, fleshy mouth and throat. It's a view that we might know well from movies, but it's probably and hopefully one that we've never encountered in real life. And personally, for my sake, I hope I never do. Standing in a gallery with the work allows you to see a shark up close and personal, including all of the details you probably never noticed before. It is a very weird experience, one that's hard to process. I am standing in a contemporary art gallery staring in the face of a dead shark that somehow looks like it wants to eat me, despite being dead. It's not a natural experience, and it's one that makes us recall all of the fears that we have about sharks. Even though we understand that in the space of the gallery, The shark is no threat to us. So why then do we still feel afraid? Maybe because it's not about the shark, and it never was. As art critic Jeannie Yabrov said, quote, the terror it invinces is not of outside threat, but of the mortality we carry within ourselves. End quote. In other words, the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living is arguably the most important work of Damien Hearst's early career, maybe even his career full stop. It is also a work that made a lot of people very, very angry. But we'll get to that a little bit later. For now, I instead want to tell you about Hearst. Damien Hearst was born in England in 1965. At the time of recording, in April of 2024, he is 58 years young and still outraging art snobs around the world while making bank. When I say bank, I mean bank. Not bad for a kid that I described in my notes as your classic young f up. Excuse my language, but it is a good encapsulation of things. Hearst was a hooligan, the one with a yen for art, particularly drawing. Hearst grew up in Leeds, England, where he spent a good part of his teenage years working part-time at the local morgue and regularly visiting the anatomy labs of the university there. Needless to say, Hearst has always had an interest in, you could even say an obsession with, death. After being rejected from art schools and college several times, Hearst eventually enrolled in Goldsmith's College of Arts in London, where his career started in earnest. There he met a group of peers who would eventually form something of a collective, if not among themselves, then among art critics, who referred to the group as the Young British Artists, YBAs or Young Brits for short. At some point in the late 80s and early 90s, the work of Hearst and his peers caught the eye of a man named Charles Saatchi. Saatchi was one half of the world's most lucrative advertising agency, which made him millions. Saatchi regularly invested that money in art, and in the 1980s he even founded his own gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, which remains one of the most famous galleries in London, if not the world. There, Saatchi displays art from his personal collection, in a bid to, or so he claims, celebrate contemporary arts and share it with the world. And he is especially interested in exhibiting artworks that you would not normally encounter in a traditional museum or gallery. Charles Saatchi is often credited with putting Damien Hearst on the map. Over the many years that Saatchi has been collecting art, he has exhibited a certain pattern. It can be boiled down to your classic investment strategy: buy low, sell high. He would regularly purchase the work of young and upcoming artists, and then work to elevate their profile not just by buying more of their works, but also by exhibiting those works at the Saatchi Gallery. Once that artist's profile was sufficiently established, Saatchi would then sell those works, often making exponentially more from the sale of them than he paid for them. He would then use some of the profits from that sale to go and buy a new up-and-coming artist's work. Rinse and repeat. That is exactly what happened with Damien Hearst, to the point that people often credit Charles Sacchi for putting Hearst on the map. The work at the heart of our episode today was an essential player in that process. For Hearst, the work started with its concept, the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. He claims that he took the title from an essay that he wrote in college about filmmaker Robert Longo. Turning that idea into a material reality, however, was going to require money. Shark buying money, which is something that Hearst didn't have, at least not yet. Thankfully, what Hearst did have was Saatchi, who had purchased a few of his works previously. As a millionaire is wont to do, Saatchi purchased the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living on concept alone. The price tag? 50,000 pounds, or something like $63,000, a good portion of which went into purchasing the supplies needed to realize that concept, including a shark. Lindsay, where and how does one buy a shark? Well these days you don't, because it's largely illegal. But in the 90s, you do what Damien Hearst did and you start making phone calls. Thankfully, Hearst didn't mind making a phone call or two or twenty. One of his odd jobs before becoming a millionaire artist a hundred times over was interning at a telemarketing company, which quite frankly sounds absolutely god-awful. But it does make you very good at cold calling people, which is what Damian Hearst did. He started by calling every post office along the southern coast of Australia, asking them to place a shark-wanted ad in their windows. Many obliged, and within a few days, Hearst's phone was ringing off the hook. Over the course of those many conversations, one name kept getting mentioned to Hearst. As shared at the start of the episode, Vic Hislop is quite the character, and he hates sharks so much that he made killing them his entire profession. And from what I've read and seen, his entire personality. And yes, he really did call them God's mistake, which is one of the sickest burns I have read in quite a minute. In the end, after a few stops and starts, Hislop ended up catching Hearst, a 14-foot tiger shark. That's 4.3 meters from my metric homies out there, and I know there's a few of you. It was critically important for Hurst's work that this shark was well preserved, which meant sticking it in a freezer with a wrench or some kind of plank in between its jaws to ensure that it would freeze with its mouth open. The shark was then shipped in a freezer halfway across the world to England. All of this, including shipping and handling, cost Hearst between five and six thousand pounds, which was, of course, paid for using Charles Satchi's money. At this point, though, Hearst really didn't know that much about taxidermy practices, much less taxidermying a whole freaking shark. He would soon become a relative expert at the process because taxidermied animal corpses ended up forming a very large portion of his artistic production, one commonly referred to as the natural history series. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living was one of the first in this series, and definitely the first to feature the quote-unquote format of an animal corpse submerged in a tank filled with a formaldehyde solution, over 4,000 gallons of it. In 1992, Charles Sacchi, the man who paid for all of this, put on an exhibition at his gallery featuring the work of young British artists, including Hearst. It was at that exhibition that the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living made its first appearance in public. And who boy did it make quite the splash. Yes, pun intended. The reception of the work appears to have been not just mixed, but contentious. Some people thought it was incredible, others thought it was horrific, and even more thought it was tacky. One critic, Robert Hughes, called the work a cultural obscenity, while someone writing for the newspaper The Sun described it as 50,000 pounds for a fish without chips. The pettiness is amazing. But there was one thing that everyone could agree on. Whether they liked it or not, the young Damian Hearst was here to stay. What wasn't here to stay was the shark, the one that Hearst had submerged in a 5% formaldehyde solution, a solution that several experts told him was too weak to preserve the shark. That became evident within just a couple of years of the artwork being made, when the solution began to turn murky, and the shark's skin began to get all wrinkly and gross looking. Long story short, the taxidermy job that Hearst had done failed miserably. In particular, he hadn't injected the shark with any kind of preservative, resulting in this big fish rotting from the inside out. None of this was helped by the fact that the people at the Satchi Gallery tried to DIY a fix by pouring bleach into the tank. What does one do with a 13-foot shark that is rotting from the inside out? It's one of life's age-old questions, right? And Hearst had an answer, though not necessarily a good one. He and Satchi consulted on the matter and decided to skin the shark and stretch that skin over a shark-shaped fiberglass mold. I don't know which job I'd want less: interning at a telemarketing center or skinning a half-rotted shark. Now that I say that out loud, the answer is clear. I'll take the shark, please. The resulting fix, though, with this new shark-shaped fiberglass mold left Hearst feeling cold. He later voiced his disappointment with the final product, stating, quote, You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight. This was no longer a shark. It was a fiberglass mold in shark's clothing. And it would stay that way for many, many years. Until 2004, which is when Charles Saatchi began offloading a lot of works by young British artists that he'd bought in the previous decade. By now, several of those artists were household names and their work was worth a heck of a lot more than it was when Saatchi paid for it. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living was one of the works Saatchi decided to sell. And one could say it caused quite the kerfluffle. Yes, kerfluffle. Both world-class museums and super rich people expressed interest in buying it. The successful buyer was a man by the name of Stephen Cohen, a very successful American venture capitalist who today is a literal billionaire. No one knows exactly how much Cohen paid for the work, though the numbers 8 and 12 come up often, followed by the real kicker. Million. To remind you, the original cost of the work, including everything needed to make it, was 50,000 pounds. That is approximately a 16,000% increase in value over the course of about 13 years. Which is wild. And the buck don't stop there. Once the work had been officially sold, Hearst stepped in and made Cohen an offer. Hearst would replace the no longer a shark shark, thereby returning the work to its intended visual and conceptual state. Something that Hearst felt had gotten lost when the shark was no longer, quote unquote, real. It probably didn't help that by 2005 the original shark's skin not only started to turn green and wrinkly, but one of its fins rotted off. Ugh. Uh, one art critic, this made me laugh. So one art critic described encountering the work in a gallery as being a similar experience to, quote, entering Norman Bates's fruit cellar and finding Mother embalmed in her chair. End quote. For my young'ins out there, Norman Bates is the serial killer in the movie Psycho, in which he keeps his mom's mummified body in the basement. It's one of those classic scenes where you first think it's just a little old lady sitting in a chair until you turn her around and bam, it's a mommy mummy. Cohen not only agreed to Hearst's offer to replace the shark, but he even offered to pay for it. Later, when asked about the cost of this quote-unquote renovation, Cohen simply described it as insignificant. Do you want to know what constitutes insignificant? Approximately $100,000. That does not compute for me because I still feel financially reckless if I don't pick up nickels and dimes from the sidewalk. Before talking about the logistics of all of this, I want to address the massive rotting shark in the room, literally and figuratively. Does replacing the shark fundamentally change the work? Does it make it something new? Opinions on this vary, but if we accept that conceptual artworks are indeed more about the concept than the outcome, then as far as I'm concerned, if the artist is cool with it and the buyer is cool with it, all is good in the neighborhood. Others don't see it that way, and some people got really mad about it. But that's just the story of human existence, right? Someone is always going to be mad about something. By 2004, Damien Hurst was pretty well versed, I rhymed, in buying shark corpses. You could say that he's got a guy, our grumpy neighborhood shark hunter, Vic Hislop. Unfortunately for Hurst and Hislop both, in the late 90s, Australia had passed new laws that prevented the hunting of certain shark species, which really put a cramp in Vic Hislop's business. Luckily for Hurst, though, Hislop had some backups in the form of various frozen sharks that he'd hunted before all of these new restrictions were implemented. I'm not exactly sure how long a shark lasts in the freezer, but apparently it's quite a long time. Ironically, the frozen shark corpse that would replace the rotting carcass of its shark brethren traveled to England by sea. Instead of swimming, however, it was transported in a 20-foot shippable freezer that had its own backup power source, which is good, because the shark was in transit for two months. Can you imagine what it would have been like opening that freezer door if something had malfunctioned at any point in the journey? No, thank you. The shark was destined for Hearst's very large studio in an old abandoned airplane hangar in Gloucestershire, England. This studio is huge. It's literally a converted World War II airplane hangar. No big deal. That meant that there was a lot of space for freezers. So much space for freezers, in fact, that it's not uncommon for Hearst to hold specimens in his freezers as a favor for natural history museums. And that's a good thing because it also means Hearst has connections to experts like Oliver Crimin, the senior curator of fish at the Museum of Natural History in London. That's his actual title, senior curator, fish. That is what you'd call a fantastic job title. Fourteen years on, from his first experience taxidermying a shark, Hearst had learned a thing or two, and he did not want another rotting shark on his hands. So he called Crimin, who agreed to consult on taxidermying our new leading lady. A 13-foot tiger shark estimated to be middle-aged, which for a shark is 25 to 30 years old. I would say that I feel seen, but I am now quite a few years older than Miss Shark. As to whether or not I'm middle-aged, time will tell. The taxidermy process for this shark was no joke. It took a team of six people, weeks, to accomplish what turned out to be a very unpleasant task, one that required full rubberized bodysuits and special security gates that locked in toxic fumes. Even seasoned professionals like Crimin could only withstand the environment for a few hours before needing a break. And I can hear you asking from way over there, Lindsay, how does one taxidermy a shark? Oh, you weren't asking? Well, buckle up. Because I'm about to tell you, and it is fascinating and horrifying. The first thing the team needed to do was use a bunch of needles to inject formaldehyde straight into Miss Shark's body. A fun fact, shark skin is comprised of something called dermal denticles, which under a microscope look like scales, but they're actually more like tiny, tiny teeth that act as a kind of shark armor. Because of that, the team couldn't just inject needles straight into the shark's skin. They first had to drill holes in order for the needles to do their thing. These were very tiny drill holes, but still ick. While this is all happening, the team are standing in a tank filled with a strong formaldehyde solution. Miss Shark could not be removed from that solution. Being made primarily of cartilage meant that if she were removed for any significant period of time, she would wither up. To really ensure her preservation, Miss Shark was marinated, that's the word the team used, marinated in that solution for two weeks. That might sound like overkill, but it was critically important that this lady shark be Formeldehed up to the gills. Otherwise, she was going to suffer the same fate as her predecessor. This whole process, from selling the shark to Cohen, deciding to replace the shark, getting a new shark, doing all the work, that all took about three years. The refurbished version of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living made its public debut in early 2007, when it was displayed at an art museum in Austria. Later in that same year, the shark went on long-term loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York City. It remained there for three years before being reclaimed by Cohen. As for the logistics of moving the work, the entire ensemble weighed something like 22 ton, and the shark had its own shark-shaped traveling container. I have no idea what this looked like, but I am intrigued. Even after all of this time, the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living remains fairly controversial, much like the artist himself. In just the past couple of months, there have been accusations that Damian Hearst deliberately misdated some of his artworks to the early 90s despite them actually being made in the 2010s. He is also well known for using assistance to create many of the works he sells as autograph, which is to say works that he made himself. That may all sound awful, and in some cases it is, but remember this is conceptual art, and it plays by significantly different rules than other kinds of art. That makes it quite easy for artists like Hearst to hide behind the excuse, if you want to call it that, that it doesn't matter who made something or when it was made. The idea is what matters most. That, however, inspires yet another uncomfy question. Are the ideas Hearst's own? The answer depends on who you ask. If you asked a British guy by the name of Eddie Saunders, he'd say, heck no. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Eddie Saunders owned an electrical shop in London where he displayed a taxidermide shark. Now the way that people talk and write about Saunders' shark would have you believe, if only through omission, that this shark was presented in a very similar way to Hearst's. It's a shark in a tank. I cannot tell you how many times I read an article accusing Hearst of plagiarizing the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, and thought, huh, weird to put what is essentially a fish in a bath in an electrical shop. That has the potential to be shocking in more ways than one. But no, Saunders' shark was not in a tank. It was hanging on the wall. And before you picture a fresh shark nailed to the wall, allow me to assure you that this shark had been taxidermied using traditional methods. The ones that turn dead fish into like glossy sculpture things. When I found out that detail, which is a pretty significant detail, I became a lot less interested in Saunders' claims that Hearst plagiarized his quote-unquote idea to display a shark. If anything, I think that Saunders ripped off Hearst, because years later, Saunders put this taxidermide shark on display behind glass that replicated the visual effect of a shark being viewed in a tank. Saunders called that work a dead shark isn't art, and he offered to sell it for cool one million pounds. Not coincidentally, this is all happening shortly after Hearst sold the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living to Cohen, which explains Saunders' chosen tagline for this exhibition. Why settle for expensive imitations when you can get the original for less? Saunders can absolutely feel any way he wants to about Hearst and his work. Personally, however, I perceive all of this as engineered outrage and a guy trying to make a buck. That said, there are a few other accusations of plagiarism against Hearst that have at least a slightly more substance, but none of them, from what I've seen, have convinced me that Hearst deliberately ripped anyone off. Or should I say, not more so than any other artist in history. Now, would my opinion be different if I was the person who he was, you know, getting his inspiration from? Yeah, probably, but I never claimed not to be a hypocrite. There are any number of accusations that you can throw at Damian Hearst, and people have. But his greatest sin in the eyes of popular opinion is that he got super rich making the kinds of things that people point to and say, well, I could have done that. A lot of contemporary and modern artworks get that response. I have even said it a few times myself, but the fact of the matter is that we didn't do it. Hearst did. But when someone like him makes millions off of a taxidermied animal in a tank, people get very upset because it all just seems too easy. It is even easier to do all of this when you have millions of dollars and a massive studio that is able to churn out work that you know people are going to buy. There are countless works by Damien Hearst in the world that were barely, if ever, even touched by Hearst himself. He has a massive team of people who work for him. This too upsets people. And yet there are those out there who are willing to pay millions of dollars for such works, and so Hearst and his team have continued to produce them. As a result, he has been accused of commoditizing and commercializing art, of turning art into a product. And it's something that he is absolutely doing. But it's not something I can necessarily hold against him. Like something like Louis Vuitton handbags, Damien Hearst is now more of a brand than a man. Speaking of the man, Damien Hearst has come a long way since the early 1990s, when he first got the idea to use a taxidermied shark as an embodiment of the living mind's incapability of confronting the physical realities of death. That was quite the sentence. Anyway, it is largely thanks to that shark, though, that Hearst's career experienced the meteoric rise that it did. In 1995, Hearst won the Turner Prize, which is arguably the greatest honor a contemporary artist working in Britain can receive in their career. And for reference, Hearst had only just turned 30. In the decades since, Hearst has experienced both great highs and great lows in his career, though there is no questioning his commercial success. In 2024, he has an estimated net worth of over $700 million. That's not too shabby for a kid who grew up working class in Leeds, where he earned pocket money by working at the local morgue. As for Hearst's occasional partner in crime, the former shark hunter Vic Hislop, Hislop continued to run his self-titled Shark Show until 2016, when he closed the controversial tourist attraction after 30 years in the business, citing personal reasons. When reflecting on the experience, Hislop referred to the shark show as a lifetime of work, one that he hopes has saved many lives. He also said, quote, since I notified people I was shutting down the shark show, I've had calls from all over the world. End quote. It is unclear, however, whether any of those calls included Damien Hearst. In his retirement, Hislop recently purchased a former hotel slash pub, which he plans to turn into a private vacation house for his family and friends. He said that he plans to use it as a base for hunting and fishing, just not of sharks. Hislop's legacy, like that of Hearst, will remain inextricable from the creatures he once called God's mistake, not least of all because of the 14-foot tiger shark that he furnished for one of Hearst's greatest masterpieces. That shark, in the form of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, remain in the collection of Steve Cohen, though it's unclear where or whether the installation is on display. As for the future, Cohen has stated on several occasions that he eventually intends to donate the work to a museum, and there are hundreds around the world that would love to have it, inviting visitors into their galleries each day to contemplate the menacing teeth of a long-dead shark. As for how long one can expect the shark to last given the fate of its predecessor, Hearst claims that there is no expectation that the shark will last forever. It just has to outlast him. What did I tell you? Mad fucking crazy.com. Please do note that there are several semi-graphic images posted that include freshly killed sharks. I don't want you to get a jump scare and or traumatize any small children. As for some of the sources that I used for the episode, there are a lot of them. There are a lot of them. But chief among them was a book by Don Thompson called The $12 million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. I also read a ton of articles by the likes of Carrie Davis, Norman Miller, Christina Ruiz, Jerry Saltz, Zusanna Stanska, Carol Vogel, and Jenny Yabroff. I also greatly enjoyed reading On the Way to Work, which is an edited volume of interviews that Damian Hurst gave to Gordon Byrne in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although I did read that book in one sitting, and uh when I resurfaced, it felt a little bit like I had been marinating in Formildehyde uh for a while. All of those sources and more will be posted on the podcast's website along with images, which again will be stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. As a little peek behind the curtains, uh, my original plan was to make two episodes about Damien Hearst, but I am a little hearsted out after spending the past six weeks staring into the maw of a shark. So I think I'm just going to stick with a potential mini-sode follow-up that covers a different and much later aspect of his career. We will see how that develops. That is what brings me to my favorite part of the episode, and some of yours too, I know, which is Gus Corner, which for new listeners is the 30 seconds I take to talk about my dog, Gus. Since the last episode dropped, Gus turned the big one. That's right. He is officially 11 years old. He's a little old man. Except he's not really that little, and I've started to partially but not really joke that he's on a weight loss journey. But my efforts are being sabotaged left, right, and center, including by Gus himself, who is downright shameless and has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. But he still enjoys his daily walks, however slow, and he receives ample daily doses of loving. Or as we sometimes refer to it in our house, Luffin. As for me Corner, I am currently home with Gus and the family at the moment, which is awesome and makes me a lot happier. I did just realize though, so I started recording this episode in my apartment in Indiana, but I am now in my parents' closet in Wisconsin, and I'm pretty sure that I have my mic and my computer set up on the boxes that they use to keep important documents, including their wills, which uh is a little too topical for this episode, and so I shall set it aside and ignore it. If you enjoyed this episode or have been liking the podcast in general, the best thing that you can do for me is leave it a rating or a review wherever you listen to it, if that platform allows for you to do so. You are also always welcome to message me directly either via the Contact Me tab on the podcast's website or straight to the podcast email, stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to respond, but I do always respond eventually. The usual thanks go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org, which is where I source the royalty free music that you hear at the beginning and the end of the episode. The first classical tune that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto No. And the second, jauntier tune is called Success Dreams. And of course, I will remind you, those who have stuck through till the very end, I will remind you to look at something beautiful today. On that note, I'm gonna go snuggle my 11-year-old dog.