Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

lobsters). And Rob Chinnery paid £23,500 ($53,000) for what turned out to be the most expensive lot sold at the auction: The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. Four years after the sale, the Wattses reportedly threatened Bonhams with a lawsuit for failing to notify them of Hirst's offer, and the Walter Potter Foundation had been established to attempt to reassemble the exhibits.

7. IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA

I LIKE TO THINK of Damien Hirst as a very rich Walter Potter and his exhibits as a contemporary museum of curiosities—places where people encounter the most shocking and distorted forms of nature: sectioned cows, pickled sharks, glass-encased skeletons, and giant mosaics made entirely of butterfly wings. People are willing to spend millions of dollars on a single Hirst sculpture. In August 2007, he sold a platinum skull studded with 8,601 diamonds for $100 million. Nevertheless, he can create a sense of wonder (or repulsion or fear) in the minds of his viewers only if what he presents is convincing—at least perceived to be genuine. And for that he employs scores of artists, including "the woman behind the dead animals": Emily Mayer.

A year or so after the Potter's auction, Mayer invited me to the Tate Britain for the opening of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." The name is from the psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly's monstrously popular album of 1968. Apparently, Iron Butterfly's lead singer, Doug Ingle, was too stoned to say "Garden of Eden," and that title came out instead. It was a great name for the Hirst show because it, too, was a garbled Eden, one in which the themes of fear, desire, sex, death, and decay collided to form unsettling tensions.

When I arrived in Guilt Cross, Mayer was in the yard combing a collie that looked as if it had been coated in aspic. She was using a fork to extract silicone from its fur, which was an incredibly tedious process because the fork kept bending out of shape. "I've got to finish the collie and then get on with the dodo skeleton," she said, dipping the fork into solvent, which smelled like nail polish remover and cut through the cloying smell of silage and manure from the surrounding dairy farms. In addition to the fork, Mayer used a horse-hoof-trimming knife and a gynecological tool she called "a nasty instrument for taking smear samples from women." "I think this is a better use for it," she said indignantly. I groaned. One minute she's crass, and the next she's Mother Nature, looking up at the rooks swooping overhead (as she was now doing) and talking about global warming: "I have an issue with people saying animals are pests. I think the biggest pest on earth is us!"

On the train to London the next morning, Mayer considered how people would react to the huge slabs of beef she'd molded for the show. "I wonder whether or not they will think it's real. If anyone asks, [Hirst is] going to say they are real and changed every day. How important to the work that is, I don't know." It's very important, in fact. For Hirst, realism (or the illusion of realism) is what differentiates his work (and taxidermy, for that matter) from representational art and gives it the provocative edge he is famous for. His skeletons, sectioned cows, and bisected pigs are genuine, and to see them in a museum (out of context) is intentionally disturbing, exciting, and sad. The floating tiger shark, for instance, was inspired by the movie Jaws, because he wanted to show something "real enough to frighten you."

The Tate Britain is not very scary. We arrived an hour before the opening. Mayer dressed up looks nothing like Mayer in her grimy work clothes. She has on a green suede bolero jacket from France with a spider brooch on the lapel, mod blue mirrored sunglasses, and trim "city leopard" spotted pants. I followed her to the service entrance, where she handed me a badge that said TATE CONTRACTOR, FLYING BEAR LTD. I put it on, and we glided through security. Attending a Hirst opening as a contractor was nothing like attending it as a curator, art dealer, or critic. I felt like one of his artistic stagehands—the artists and technicians who work behind the scenes, enabling Hirst to put on his show.

And what a show he puts on. We walked under two rotundas, lit purple and yellow like a chic dance club, and into a hallway where Hirst was sitting with his crew. When he saw Mayer, he shouted, "Drum roll for Em-i-ly!" Everyone pounded on the table as Mayer approached Hirst, who hugged her. Reporters and television cameramen hovered around, waiting for interviews. People slapped Hirst on the back in a congratulatory manner. It felt as if we were backstage at a West End theater production on opening night, with Hirst the leading man. He was wearing brown-tinted sunglasses, a long sweater-coat with dragons embroidered on the back, and taut green leather shoes that looked reptilian. He has spiky salt-and-pepper hair and is half a head shorter than Mayer, who playfully hopped on his lap before she took off to chat with friends.

"She sounds like a man!" he said, smiling, as I opened my notebook. I laughed out loud. I considered what I knew about this man who had transformed himself from a working-class lad from Leeds into one of England's wealthiest men. He was born in 1965. He didn't know his birth father, and the father who raised him (a car salesman) left when he was twelve. He never forgave the Catholic Church for turning its back on his mother (a former florist with an artistic bent). As a kid, Hirst's childhood bedroom was an animal laboratory where he, like Mayer, bred and raised butterflies and other creatures. He is a Gemini ("I want to fucking share everything with everybody and have a party for the rest of my life") who loves the Beatles song "Two of Us." He has an insatiable fear of death (a