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This is the most expensive work of art in history. It is by Britain's most famous, controversial, and wealthiest, contemporary artist, Damien Hirst.
Hirst's latest solo show called "Beyond Belief" has made $250 million in five weeks -- the centerpiece being a platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds (1,106.18 carats) entitled "For the Love of God" with a price of around $100 million -- a collector is currently negotiating to acquire it.
Damien Hirst's diamond skull
Damien Hirst's latest artwork is this life-size platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 fine diamonds. The sculpture, titled "For The Love of God," will likely sell for as much as $100 million, making it the priciest contemporary artwork ever made. White Cube gallery is selling several limited edition silkscreen prints of the work, priced from £900 to £10,000, for one sprinkled with diamond dust. The title of the piece comes from Hirst's mother who asked her son, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?” From the New York Times:
For Hirst, famous pickler of sharks and bovine bisector, all his art is about death. This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”
Hirst, who financed the piece himself, watched for months as the price of international diamonds rose while the Bond Street gem dealer Bentley & Skinner tried to corner the market for the artist’s benefit. Given the ongoing controversy over blood diamonds from Africa, “For the Love of God” now has the potential to be about death in a more literal way.
“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”
boingboing.net
By Jeremy Lovell
LONDON, July 6 (Reuters) - British artist Damien Hirst's latest solo show "Beyond Belief" at London's White Cube gallery, which closes this weekend, has taken $250 million in sales in just five weeks, the gallery said on Friday.
And that does not include the star work, a diamond encrusted platinum skull whose sale for an asking price of 50 million pounds ($100.5 million) is still under negotiation.
"The show has realised a quarter of a billion dollars worth of sales without the skull," a spokesman for the gallery said.
Apart from the skull, the show has many new works by Hirst including pickled creatures, a dove suspended in mid-air, a flayed human statue holding its own skin and a series of pictures of a Caesarean birth operation on Hirst's wife.
The 42-year-old is expected to take a 70 percent cut of the proceeds with the gallery taking the remaining 30 percent.
The past month has been a good one for the boy from Bristol.
Hirst, who first made his name with diced and pickled quadrupeds, last month became the world's most expensive living artist at auction when his "Lullaby Spring" pill cabinet sold at Sotheby's for 9.6 million pounds.
But the diamond encrusted skull is by far the most precious piece to date by Hirst, already a millionaire several times over.
As an indication of the wealth he has amassed since being spotted in 1991 by BritArt mogul Charles Saatchi, Hirst, who financed the skull himself, said he couldn't remember whether it had cost 10 or 15 million pounds to make.
The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European male, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than four million pounds in the centre of its forehead.
Hirst said he was inspired by similarly bejewelled Aztec skulls. While the skull is platinum and the diamonds flawless -- and ethically sourced, Hirst stressed -- the teeth are real.
"It was very important to put the real teeth back. Like the animals in formaldehyde you have got an actual animal in there. It is not a representation. I wanted it to be real," he told Reuters when the skull was first unveiled to the public.
Hirst, whose works regularly fetch millions of pounds, said he hoped the skull would not be snapped up by a private buyer and taken away from public view.
"It would be sad it it ends up in a vault somewhere that nobody sees. Obviously I would like it to be on display," he said. "If anybody buys it, I would make that part of the conditions".
He rejected suggestions that his works were more a standing joke against the art establishment than real works of art.
But when asked what his next project would be he immediately replied: "Two diamond skeletons shagging -- no just kidding."
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