The £50,000 Hirst Shark Started Decaying, So a Hedge Fund Manager Bought It a New One

Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — a 14-foot tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde inside a steel-and-glass tank — was commissioned in 1991 by the advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi, who had given Hirst a blank check to make whatever he wanted. The shark itself was caught off Hervey Bay, Queensland, by a fisherman who supplied it for about £6,000. Total production cost reached around £50,000. The Sun covered the unveiling at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992 with the headline "£50,000 for fish without chips."

The trouble was that the shark was preserved badly. Formaldehyde injected into a body of that size doesn't reach the interior tissue cleanly; over the next decade the specimen yellowed, sagged, and developed visible decomposition behind the gills. Saatchi's gallery added bleach to the tank, which made things worse — by 2003 the shark had to be skinned and stretched over a fiberglass frame to maintain its shape.

In 2004, Saatchi sold the work to the hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen for an estimated $8 million. Cohen, on inspecting his purchase, decided the original shark had to go. He paid for a replacement specimen — also a tiger shark, also caught in Australia — under the supervision of Oliver Crimmen, the senior curator of fish at London's Natural History Museum. The new shark was injected with formaldehyde while still living, the tissue saturated correctly, and the result installed in 2006 at the original tank dimensions. Cohen called the $100,000 replacement cost "inconsequential." The work that hangs in MoMA's PS1 today is, in the strict sense, a different animal.