page_title: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
section_title: Responses
hierarchical_section_title: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living / Responses
context_page_description: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and a leading member of the "Young British Artists". It consists of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine. It was originally commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, who sold it in 2004, to Steven A. Cohen for an undisclosed amount, widely reported to have been at least $8 million. However, the title of Don Thompson's book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, suggests a higher figure.
  Owing to deterioration of the original 14-foot tiger shark, it was replaced with a new specimen in 2006. It was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 2007 to 2010.
  It is considered an iconic work of British art in the 1990s, and has become a symbol of Britart worldwide.
context_section_description: In 2003, under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a shark which had first been put on public display two years before Hirst's by Eddie Saunders in his Shoreditch (London) shop, JD Electrical Supplies. The Stuckists suggested that Hirst may have got the idea for his work from Saunders' shop display.
  In a speech at the Royal Academy in 2004, art critic Robert Hughes used The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living as a prime example of how the international art market at the time was a "cultural obscenity". Without naming the artwork or the artist, he stated that brush marks in the lace collar of a painting by Velázquez could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames".
  The 2009 British-Hungarian film The Nutcracker in 3D features a scene in which a pet shark is electrocuted in a water tank, which director Andrei Konchalovsky cites as a reference to Hirst's artwork.
  Hirst's response to those who said that anyone could have done this artwork was, "But you didn't, did you?"
caption: A Dead Shark Isn't Art, 2003. Stuckism International Gallery
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