Damien Hirst's shark is about the fear of death. The title, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, says that no one alive can picture being dead, so Hirst put a 14-foot tiger shark in a tank and made it big enough to eat you.
Charles Saatchi paid for it in 1991, and it was first shown at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992. The Sun ran its verdict on the show: "£50,000 for fish without chips."
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The shark in that tank is not the shark Hirst ordered.
It is the second one, caught around 2005. The first was replaced in 2006, and by 1993 its skin had already been stripped off and stretched over a fiberglass mold.
Hirst explained what went wrong in 2006. "The last shark was never injected, so it decayed from the inside," he told the New York Times. Then he said of the new one: "It's the same piece."
A work about beating death had rotted in front of visitors, and its maker called the replacement the same work. I think Hirst needs the shark to be an idea when it decays and an animal when it frightens. That is the question hanging over every tank.
Who caught the shark?
Not Hirst. Saatchi had offered to fund whatever Hirst wanted to build, and in 1991 Hirst asked for a shark "big enough to eat you." Artnet names the man who caught it as Vic Hislop, a shark hunter in Hervey Bay, Queensland.
The fish was a 14-foot tiger shark. It was killed, frozen and shipped to London. The shark cost Hirst £6,000, and the finished work cost £50,000.
Hirst did not have the money for the freight. He borrowed it from a collector, Doris Lockhart, who gave it to him outright and picked a piece from his studio in return, The Only Way Is Up.
Hislop caught twelve sharks for Hirst in all, and Hirst used sharks in several works. Keeping the first one in one piece proved much harder than catching it.
What You'll Discover
Why the first shark rotted.
What Saatchi's curators did to it.
Who paid for a second shark.
What makes it the same piece.