Animals Have Died
How Many Animals Have Died for Damien Hirst’s Art to Live? We Counted. Nearly one million, by our conservative estimate. Damien Hirst is back . More than a decade after he last made headlines, the artist has a new exhibition at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana in Venice with a new body of work that delves into the imagined story of an ancient collector and the shipwreck that consigned his treasures to the bottom of the sea. One of the many noteworthy elements of the show? It doesn’t contain the unusual art material that has powered Hirst’s most famous work: the dead bodies of animals. Ever since his explosive entry to the British art scene with his 1990 masterpiece One Thousand Years —a vitrine featuring a rotting cow skull that breeds maggots that become flies that meet their end from a buzzing bug zapper above—Hirst has made mortality the great theme of his oeuvre. He deploys real cadavers in gallery settings to confront viewers with the...

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