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I Bet Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon Will Fistfight In Hell
By Nick | February 20, 2010
There is shock value in the bull’s head resting in a gold-plated tank filled with formaldehyde: Damien Hirst’s “End of an Era” (2009). You circle around the installation, noting how the combination of death and chemicals makes the head seem deflated, like an old basketball: the eyelids are heavy, and droop; the cheeks and neck are soft and nearly liquid; the thick white hair worn to gossamer threads. The whole room glitters faintly, from the gold cabinet behind you filled with manufactured diamonds. You move to the doorway, and observe this glittery bit of Ecce bovinae carnum, this freeze-frame Grand Guignol, this dichotomy like an autopsy table placed front-and-center in a Louis Vuitton boutique, and you think: This? I traveled forty minutes uptown on a Saturday morning for this?
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