“Paging Dr Hirst, your dinner is ready…”

Just when you thought you’d seen your last DAMIEN HIRST headline for a while, the head ringmaster of the circus that is the modern art world unveiled his latest shock and awe campaign at NYC’s upscale LEVER HOUSE (54th & Park Ave) in the form of a vast installation of his trademark formaldehyde-preserved livestock (including a shark, 30 sheep, a split cow, and a pair of doves) economically titled “School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge.” Commissioned at a cost of $10 million by real estate developer Aby Rosen who owns Lever House along with several other high-profile properties including the Gramercy Park Hotel, the installation only cost Mr Hirst a cool million to assemble from parts and livestock he imported from England for the installation. Assembled in the building’s street-level lobby, the gruesome exhibit will be visible to all passers-by, day and night, as the entire show will be illuminated 24 hours a day by vast tracts of fluorescent lighting (no word yet as to how many times a day hand and nose prints will be scrubbed from the building’s windows). If the Lever House location sounds familiar to Hirst fans, it should. The building currently houses one of Damien’s masterworks, the 3o-foot-tall bronze sculpture “The Virgin Mother” on its grounds as part of the building’s permanent collection. And if that weren’t enough to satiate rabid anglophile art aficionados, Hirst’s most legendary work, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” (aka: the shark in the tank) is currently on display until 2010 at the city’s Met Museum. Take that, Murakami…

All flix by sharpshooters JW & Paul Brady…

Hirst’s split sides of beef…

And the Francis Bacon image, “Painting,” that inspired it.

The scene of the art crime…

“THE VIRGIN MOTER,” BY DAMIEN HIRST:

As if one monumental Hirst weren’t enough…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.