But the $12m figure was the most widely cited, it produced extensive publicity, and the parties agreed not to discuss the amount. Several New York media reported that the only other firm offer aside from that made by Tate Modern came from Cohen, and that the actual selling price was $8m. Some journalists later expressed doubt as to whether the selling price for Physical Impossibility actually was $12m. When alerted that Saatchi intended to sell soon, Cohen agreed to buy. Nicholas Serota offered Gagosian $2m on behalf of Tate Modern, but it was turned down. The most promising was the American Steve Cohen, a very rich Connecticut hedge-fund executive. Four collectors with much greater financial means had shown moderate interest. One buyer known to be pursuing the shark was Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of London's Tate galleries, who had a very constrained budget to work with. The agent selling the shark was New York-based Larry Gagosian, the world's most famous art dealer.

But Hirst intended the figure to be an 'outrageous' price, set as much for the publicity it would attract as for the monetary return. At the time, that sum was considered so ridiculous that The Sun heralded the transaction with the headline: '50,000 For Fish Without Chips'. The seller was Charles Saatchi, an advertising magnate and art collector, who 14 years earlier had commissioned Hirst to produce the work for £50,000. Part of the answer is that in the world of contemporary art, branding can substitute for critical judgement, and lots of branding was involved here. Why would anyone even consider paying this much money for the shark? The question was important because $12m represented more money than had ever been paid for a work by a living artist, other than Jasper Johns – more than for a Gerhard Richter, a Robert Rauschenberg or a Lucian Freud. It had been caught in 1991 in Australia and prepared and mounted in England by technicians working under the direction of the artist Damien Hirst.Īnother concern was that, while the shark was certainly a novel artistic concept, many in the art world were uncertain as to whether it qualified as art. The 15ft tiger shark 'sculpture' was mounted in a giant glass vitrine and creatively named The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Another was that it weighed just over two tons and was not going to be easy to carry home. One problem for the agent trying to sell the stuffed shark was the $12m asking price.

The $12 million stuffed shark