For future customers, Hirst has a number of smaller sharks waiting in large refrigerators, and one of them is currently on show in its tank of formalin in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inert, wretched and wrinkled, and already leaking the telltale juices of its decay, it is a dismal trophy of - what? Nothing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed. The Met should be ashamed. If this is the way America's greatest museum brings itself into line with late modernist decadence, then heaven help it, for the god Neptune will not.
Indeed.
For some reason, every article on The Guardian's 'site is garbled; I have to read all of 'em by selecting "View Source"; but, usually, it's worth it. This makes me wonder what David Foster Wallace might have opined concerning Hirst's shameless proclivities; after all, he immersed himself in the study of boiling lobsters alive to horrific effect for an Epicurean food rag, a fact The Boston Globe's Alex Beam chronicled in hia 5 August 2004 column where he examines what Mr. Wallace coined — dollared? — "Lobster-cide" (in a piece entitled "Lobster Tail Lands Writer in Hot Water"):
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