Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

British artist Damien Hirst revealed his latest work of art at the White Cube Gallery in London, June 1, 2007. “For the Love of God” is a life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and covered by 8,601 pave-set diamonds weighing 1,106.18 carats. The single large diamond in the middle of the forehead is a 52.4 carat internally flawless, light, fancy pink, brilliant-cut diamond reportedly worth $4.2 million alone. Hirst financed the project himself, and estimates it cost between 10 and 15 million. The price tag was $99 million. The platinum plates were hand-lasered with thousands of holes and the diamonds, which have a total weight of 1,106.18 carats, were individually set.

When I first saw this skull I went through a myriad of reactions that went something like:

WOW! What a fantastic thing!

Oooh! How HORRID!

buuuuut…Interesting.

COOOOOL!

Well, my thoughts needed to do a really long walking to come to that fourth observation of it being cool. The obvious in-your-face impression of this piece of art, is of course that the skull as an age old Vanitas symbol that Nothing is Forever, combined with the De Beer diamond slogan that Diamonds, are Forever, Hirst manages to add some kind of cynical humour to the combination “Death, is Forever, too”.

How cool is that.

Then I started to wonder, is that observation really worth £50 million?

My mind started to ponder a much wider circle. Looking some into this I found that the original “perfectly shaped skull” had been sourced from a taxidermy shop, with an analysis suggesting that it had probably belonged to a European man who died in his mid-thirties in the 18th or early 19th century.

But don’t those teeth awfully “fresh” to be from an 18th century skull?

A really old skull. The painting “Vanitas” by, Pieter Claesz (1597-1661).

It suddenly dawned on me that I had seen such a “fresh” looking skull once before, at the desk of an engineer who designed dental equipment. “Is this plastic?”, I asked. “No, it’s the real thing” he answered and explained that it actually came from the first World War battle fields in the Flanders. They were popular with dental clinics because the soldiers had been so young and healthy when they died, that their teeth were perfect, “Look Ma, no cavities!”.

Of course this was just my mind wandering, but then again I had just been forced – due to a lack of alternatives – to read an article about a specifically bloody battle in an obscure village in Belgium, called Passchendaele. It lasted some 100 days in the autumn of 1917. And when it ended, a total of 325,000 Allied and 260,000 German young men had died, achieving nothing.