The diamond skull Damien Hirst said he sold for 100 million? A bluff

It’s yellow over Damien Hirst’s diamond skull. Fifteen years after the announcement, it seems that the stellar sale of For The Love of God did not actually happen and the precious work remained locked in storage.

It was 2007 when Damien Hirst, at an exhibition of his work at the White Cube gallery in London, unveiled For The Love of God, the life-size platinum skull studded with 8,601 diamonds totaling 1,106 carats, and declared its record sale at the sum of $100 million. Numbers that caused a sensation because of their exceptional magnitude and, for insiders, immediately showed some inconsistencies: first, in fact, Hirst claimed to have self-financed the entire production cost of the work: 8 million pounds (about 9.6 million euros).

When the skull was exhibited the following year, however, the gallery stated that the cost of materials alone was quantified at around 15 million pounds (about 18 million euros). Before long, then, it came to the figure of $100 million, shelled out by an unidentified investment group. Today, Hirst himself, in an article to the New York Times, titled Damien Hirst and the Art of the Deal and containing some statements made by Hirst for his first exhibition in New York in four years, declares instead that the skull has always remained in his possession, indeed, in co-ownership with the same gallery and a group of investors, and that this would remain for 15 years in a storage room in Hatton Garden, the jewelry district of London.

“Hirst,” the U.S. newspaper article further reads, “added that he still felt frustration at the way potential buyers had shunned a work of art made of platinum and diamonds, when they were happy to pay millions for canvases smeared with pigment. ’Everyone agrees that making paintings costs nothing, but they can be sold for an infinite amount. Why can they believe in that one, but not the other?’ he said.”

It should be added that back in 2007 there were those who doubted the sale, given that the gallery had never provided concrete evidence, and given also the inconsistencies in Hirst’s accounts, beginning with those about the cost of materials. In short, those who doubted were right.

The diamond skull Damien Hirst said he sold for 100 million? A bluff

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.