Word: sharked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DAMIEN HIRST smashes art-auction records. Bidders unsure which wall would look best with a formaldehyde-preserved shark...
...Hirst's gift, when it's with him, is for black comedy, William Hogarth meets Stanley Kubrick - work that's part deadpan joke, part dead serious utterance about mortality and decay. The piece that first made him famous, an open-jawed shark in a tank of formaldehyde titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, offered a giant beast of prey as a belligerent correlative for a universally suppressed anxiety. A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood (actually red sugar water) from...
...early 1990s Saatchi was one of Hirst's biggest collectors and promoters. It was Saatchi who commissioned that pickled shark, which he sold 13 years later to American hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen for a reported $12 million. It was Saatchi who bundled Hirst together with other British artists he collected, like Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn, to create the media phenomenon called Young British Artists. What they had in common other than age was work that was abrasive, unconventional and a little unappetizing - Lucas' first solo exhibition was called "Penis Nailed to a Board"; Quinn produced a self-portrait...
...same, Hirst found early on an equivalent in his own work for Bacon's key motif: tortured figures writhing within a bright, clinical space. Hirst's meticulous glass tanks have some of the same feel about them, sanitary enclosures for something menacing (that shark), visceral (a bisected calf) or even putrid (that cow's head). In recent years Hirst has also begun to absorb Bacon's actual imagery into his tanks of formaldehyde. Two years ago he showed a work derived from one of the anguished triptychs Bacon made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer - with slaughtered sheep...
Milwaukee jumps shark, unveils bronze FONZ statue...