Technology, Death and the Cultural Imagination

摘要

The centrepiece of British artist Damien Hirst's 2007 exhibition Beyond Belief was a human skull encrusted with 8,601 pave diamonds (see Figure 1). Costing between £30 m and £40 m to produce and with an expected selling price of between £50 m and £100 m it was, and remains, the most expensive piece of art by a contemporary artist. The cost of For the Love of God is significant and not only because, as Richard Dorment wrote in The Telegraph on the day the piece was unveiled, it 'questions something about the morality of art and money'.