Damien Hirst's "For The Love of God"

Damien Hirst, for whom all art is about death, never ceases to impress. His latest work is a life-size platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 fine diamonds. The sculpture, titled "For The Love of God," will likely sell for as much as $100 million, making it the priciest contemporary artwork ever made.

This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise.

White Cube Gallery is selling several limited edition silkscreen prints of the work, priced from £900 to £10,000, for one sprinkled with diamond dust.

The title of the piece comes from Hirst's mother who asked her son, "For the love of God, what are you going to do next?"

This piece, which was cast from an 18th-century skull he bought in London, was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise.

Kudos to the excellent website BoingBoing for their piece on the skull.

THE MYSTERY THAT IS THE ARTIST BANKSY
The invisible man of graffiti art

In the May 14,2007 issue of The New Yorker is a piece by Lauren Collins on the pseudo-invisible british artist Banksys, one of the darlings of the Imperial Transvanguardian Art Ministry, from which I quote:

"The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He's an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, EnglandÑno, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he's fat, he's skinny, he's an introverted workhorse, he's abreeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. "

"For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint."

But are we really to believe someone named Unangst (un-angst -> no angst -> insouciant source) ?

Updated Tuesday, Christmas Day, 12/25/07 @ 05:00pm by Conrad Hunter.