Diamond skull comes to Holland

The famous diamond-bedecked skull by British artist Damien Hirst will be exhibited in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from 1 November until mid-December.

The museum’s director Director Wim Pijbes says that the contract for showing the work is the strictest he has ever signed. “The skull has to be placed in a dark room without anything else around it. Everything we have to do is in the contract. We can't even mention who the owner is...”

The skull, that of an 18th century European covered in platinum and 8,601 diamonds, was sold in 2007 to a group of investors for € 75 m, the largest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist.

The sculpture is titled "For The Love of God". The title of the piece comes from Hirst's mother who asked her son, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

For Hirst all his art is about death. This piece was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

Later he was quoted saying: “What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

What do you think of the Diamond Skull?

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