So ...

... apparantly, Damien Hirst's skull is coming to us.

Weird sentence. You'd expect him to accompany his skill with the rest of him ... but there you go. His skull is coming. Of the rest of him I know nothing. His skull is, of course, For The Love Of Gold, a platina skull inset with 8601 diamonds. It's a piece of art. It's supposedly is designed to tell us something about the nature of death, life, and the beauty of death and our fascination with it. Of course, it also manages to look like a rapper's bling dream ... but that is beside the point, I expect.

I have issues with the thing but I hope to go and see it for myself. The disturbing part is that the skull is modelled on an actual skull from the 18th century. So, evidently, it's not strictly a real skull. The teeth, however, are. And I have to wonder if an 18th century person would really be happy to have to teeth ripped from his skull and placed in this monstrosity. Maybe the person was religious and would dearly object, thinking that the second coming of Christ would be less fun if you could only partake of liquid food whilst waiting to get into heaven. It's a funny idea, but a serious point: you can't, in my opinion, take away a person's right to decide over his own body. I admit that after death all that becomes difficult in practice but then you should just go on common decency. You have to wonder what would happen if mr.Hirst had proposed to use a skull of someone who actually had living relatives. A victim of the 9/11 attacks, for instance. Or a nazi victim. I think the world would be too small for the noise. However, this skull has no family and no defenders and thus, he gets away with it ...

I feel mr.Hirst overstepped a boundary. I also suspect him of being a bit of a dick but I have no real evidence for that statement. It is, however, a nagging and constant feeling. Those turn out to be right a surprising amount of the time.