Pi-Consulting

You can’t take it with you. Official. And to prove it, look no further than the latest masterwork of British artist Damien Hirst, who has sold a life-sized bejeweled sculpted death’s head to an investor group for a death-defying $100 million US. The man who gave the world the pickled shark and the sheep-sawn-in-half in formaldehyde has excelled himself yet again, lovingly crafting a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds.

Selling this bizarre object to a “consortium of collectors” (friends of his, perhaps? Hirst himself reportedly has still “retained a position in the piece”), he has consolidated his claim to the title of World’s Best-Selling Living Artist. Poignantly, the new work is titled “For The Love Of God”, probably foreshadowing the typical reaction from members of the general public when they find out what the great man hath wrought.

What better proof do we need that the science of putting a value on things, at any rate above a certain price threshold, has more to do with creating and fulfilling expectations than with anything intrinsic? It’s all about people, not things. In a crude way, selling art works like selling stocks and shares. In the stock market, you get a lot of acquisitive people interested in acquiring a stake in a particular company, and the artfully-hyped appetite for owning a piece of said outfit drives up its value. Hirst clearly learned the lesson in spades, and put a PR-man’s dream of a price-tag on his macabre creation, a price so outrageous that it immediately became true. If he had charged less, his skull would not have been worth nearly so much. (The diamonds involved wouldn’t fetch more than $25 million, tops).

This is perhaps Hirst’s real crowning creative achievement. His masterwork is not just a comment on our age of conspicuous consumption, it instantly becomes the thing on which it comments. Brilliant!

Anyway, a hundred million dollars is quite a lot for an individual to pocket, even if he did pay some of it to himself. Having helped others to achieve an epoch-making triumph of matter over mind, what kind of stuff could the artist consider buying in order to celebrate his latest sale? What bling could satisfy the man who converted a “memento mori” into the “ne plus ultra” of bling itself?

Pi’s suggestion: cash the check and convert it into $100 bills. A million of them. Which would fill 500 decent-sized suitcases. (The T. Anthony store on New York’s Park Avenue and 56th Street have very nice purple ones for as little as $1,250 each). If Mr. Hirst does decide that he can, after all, “take it with him”, he will therefore need that much luggage, and a funeral cortege consisting of at least 25 hearses, in order to fit in all those suitcases full of banknotes. Plus, of course, a fairly capacious mausoleum with a sturdy padlock on the door…

And THAT, children, is why, in the words of the rock singer Don Henley, “You don’t see no hearses with luggage racks”.