Waiting With Baited Breath

Damien Hirst's pickled shark — officially, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — will be installed at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in late September. (Previous rumors indicated that the piece would be on view around Labor Day.) As reported by Carol Vogel in the New York Times (Culturegrrl blogger Lee Rosenbaum scooped her here), hedge fund king Steve Cohen has loaned the shark to the Met for three years after buying and restoring the rotting fish.

That the shark is going to the Met and not, say, the Museum of Modern Art (or Cohen's Connecticut offices, where it would be, according to Vogel, "an appropriate mascot for a group of aggressive traders"), is ironic. In 1999, the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, wrote an op-ed in the Times condemning the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum that made the shark (in)famous. "I have seen the exhibition, and I think the emperor has not clothes," he wrote.

Has Montebello had a change of heart? Doubtful. More likely, the Met's temporary acquisition of Hirst's iconic work is evidence that not even this venerable institution can turn a blind eye to the art world's current fixation on contemporary art and that in this context, Hirst is too colossal a figure to ignore, whether or not you like his work.

But now, the Met's coup has got everyone talking. The editorial board of the New York Times came out against the shark, writing, "You may think you are looking at a dead shark in a tank, but what you're really seeing is the convergence of two careers, the coming together of two masters in the art of the yield." Rosenbaum rightly questioned from whence the board's authority on the arts came. (She also explained Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull for them, since they didn't seem to get that either.) Journalists are heralding the piece as the dawn of contemporary art at an institution traditionally more concerned with Titians and Vermeers. It is, after all, the museum that paid upwards of $45 million in 2004 for Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child, the most expensive work it's ever bought.

Photo Credit: Steve Forrest/The New York Times/Redux