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1 Jan 2012
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“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by Damien HirstThe shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst’s 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London’s Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster.  None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever. An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D. So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. “That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it’s so iconic,” says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. “Will we look back on all these changes and say: ‘God, what a ridiculous thing to do?’ It’s kind of hard to know.” As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.

“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by Damien Hirst
The shark was, well, rotting. Despite its portentous title, Damien Hirst’s 1991 masterwork was pretty straightforward: a dead tiger shark suspended in an acrylic glass tank filled with 224 gallons of water. The problem was that the huge fish began to decompose almost immediately -Hirst had failed to preserve it properly. To stem the stench, London’s Saatchi Gallery pumped bleach into the water, but that only made the shark decompose faster.  None of this stopped an American hedge-fund manager from buying the work for $8 million in 2004, making it one of the most expensive contemporary art sales ever.

An almost comical series of attempts to preserve the putrid predator ensued. Hirst and his conservators had the shark skinned and its hide tanned and mounted onto a fiberglass skeleton. But the result, intended to inspire terror, looked like a rejected prop from Jaws 3-D.

So Hirst threw in the fish towel. He struck a deal with the buyer: For a six-figure fee, he simply acquired another dead shark from an Australian fisherman, and this time preserved it with formaldehyde. Shark number two is a foot shorter, but its gaping jaws are wider and scarier. If all goes well, it will last 250 years. “That piece is like the Sistine Chapel, it’s so iconic,” says Gwynne Ryan, sculpture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, who has worked on other Hirst pieces. “Will we look back on all these changes and say: ‘God, what a ridiculous thing to do?’ It’s kind of hard to know.”

As for shark number one? It went from a multimillion dollar artwork to 1,800 pounds of biological waste in the blink of an eye.

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