Shots in the Dark

Here’s what I’d like to do to the British artist Damien Hirst. I’d like to lure him into a room with a scrumptious meal. Then, the second he takes a bite, I’d like to yank him into the ocean with the big hook now embedded in his mouth and drown him. Then I’d like to inject him full of gallons of formaldehyde. And then I’d like to throw his body into a tank, give the whole thing a pretentious name, and sell him to some philistine hedge fund billionaire, at which point I would call his slaughter “art.”

And then I’d like to do it to him again.

Don’t worry—I’m not really homicidal. But I am somewhat provoked by this New York Times piece on Hirst and his attempt to recreate his piece of “art,” titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” Which is a profit-making way of saying that Hirst paid a fisherman to kill a tiger shark and then put it in a big tank and sold it for millions of dollars.

As some of you may remember, I vented frustration months ago when a Florida fisherman caught and killed a record-length hammerhead, just for the thrill of it. I see no difference between that pointless act and Damien Hirst killing a tiger shark and calling it art. Even worse, Hirst’s original shark decomposed, as corpses will do. So, as detailed in the Times, Hirst paid a fisherman to go out and kill him a second shark.

Tiger sharks are astonishingly beautiful animals. I wouldn’t want to swim with one—along with white sharks and bull sharks, they are dangerous—but I’m glad they’re around. Like all sharks, they’re an important part of the ocean’s ecosystem, and they enrich our lives by adding to the diversity of the planet. Trouble is, they’re just barely around. Like all of the ocean’s big fish, tiger sharks have been decimated by massive overfishing and the slaughter of sharks for their fins, so Asians can eat a status symbol that they stupidly believe is an aphrodisiac.

The Times piece doesn’t mention any of this, of course. The write-up by Carol Vogel is in the “Arts & Leisure” section, which is, in my opinion, a curious, though perhaps inadvertently telling place for an article on the pointless slaughter of a remarkable animal.

Here’s what a tiger shark looks like underwater, alive.

And here’s what Damien Hirst did to the second of the two tiger sharks he had killed.

I prefer the former, and I fail to see how what Mr. Hirst has done improves upon the natural beauty of a living animal. He hasn’t created art, but obscenity. And he’s taking his porn all the way to the bank.