The £10m zebra
As the world's major banks continue to go into meltdown, the price of fuel, food and anything else that's really important when it comes to keeping us alive continues to rocket and we steam head-long into total oblivion, one man has come up with a novel way of beating the credit crunch.
While lots of old people play scissors, paper, stone to decide whether to gamble their pensions on food or heating this winter, it must be something of a comfort to Damien Hirst that he is still able to sell complete tat for ridiculous sums of money.
Hirst has just pocketed £111m from a two-day sale of his work that, as far as I can make out, consists of various animals in tanks of formaldehyde. Well it worked with the sheep...
Top of the shop was a bull in a tank of....wait for it....formaldehyde, which went for a tidy £9.2m.
But it wasn't all good news for Hirst. One of his signature pieces - a zebra in a tank of, you guesed it, formaldehyde - sold for a disappointing £1.1m. Ooh, tough call Damien.
And if you were at all conerned that a psuedo-intellectual with pretentious glasses selling lots of dead animals to people with more money than sense for millions of pounds is one of the most obscene things you've ever heard, don't worry.
It's art.
Tomorrow: How you can beat the recession by putting your pets in formaldehyde and selling them at a car boot sale
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