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

wings off them, they still enjoyed butterflies. "Sadly, no—not that much," Rose, a bubbly blonde, replied.

While Hirst's butterfly paintings move people with their beauty, his fly paintings (giant canvases coated with gobs of dead flies that resemble gooey raisins) fill them with dread. In the next gallery, Will Sheer, the artist who made Hirst's fly painting Night Falls Fast, stood in front of the huge black monochrome. A Hirst staple, the fly paintings represent a plague of sorts—Eden falls to desire.

"Will made this," boasted Sheer's girlfriend.

"We hatch them and kill them with fly spray. They die and we scoop them up, and they get mixed up with resin and stuck on the work. We paint them into place. We do it by the liter. There must be two hundred liters [of flies] in each piece," he explained.

"They stink!" said the girlfriend.

"I got used to the smell. They smell like moldy cheese," said Sheer.

Finally, Mayer and I headed over to The Pursuit of Oblivion, a crucifixion in a butcher shop. Only this butcher shop was in a gigantic fish tank filled with provocative props. What was being crucified was Mayer's sides of beef, which hang from meat hooks above a butcher block. The molded slabs with yellow marbling looked exactly like what you'd see in a butcher shop before the meat is cut into steaks. The butcher block did not; on it was a human skull, knives, a nautilus, and a frying pan filled with brains. An umbrella and strings of sausage dangled from above, swaying in the clear water of the fish tank like plankton.

The sculpture was Hirst's homage to a Francis Bacon painting called 1946. Bacon, the Irish-born Parisian exile, who died in 1992, has been Hirst's hero since he was sixteen, and I could see why. Bacon was captivated by slaughterhouses as "the absolute place of death": meat suspended as if crucified; meat with contorted mouths screaming in agony (he also painted monsters, bloody carcasses, crucifixions, and decomposing heads—consider Hirst without bathos or tropical fish). Bacon's shock tactics were meant to evoke the horrors of human existence. He painted 1946 at the end of World War II. As Bacon once famously said, "Well of course we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead." Hirst is more minimal: "Animals become meat. That's abstract."

I stared at the swaying meat. Tropical fish darted around a skinned cow head. British art critics called the piece chaotic and heavy-handed. The viewers that night were riveted, though not disturbed or even perplexed. Still, they were not without curiosity. Mostly they wanted to know if the meat was real. Even Hirst's dealer, Jay Jopling, owner of London's White Cube gallery—someone who knows Hirst's sleight of hand—gazed into the tank, mystified. "You just would never, never, never know," he said.

"That's fabulous! Amazing!" people cried.

The tank gargled. An eel twined around a fractured human skull, evoking a medieval apothecary. "That's a small shark, I believe," said a spiffy woman.

Another person said, "I don't know how it doesn't poison the water. All the bits and pieces. The water's completely clean. I think it's a model. Is that real meat? It might have algae or something?"

The week before, when Mayer delivered the piece, the museum staff thought it was a kitchen delivery. A scuba diver had to dive in and arrange the props. The gallery floors (directly above the Tate's library) had to be reinforced to support the weight of the massive glass tanks. "The last time I saw it, the water was murky, and the [cow] head was floating up to the top," Mayer said, smiling with pride.

I went back to see it a second time. A young man with sideburns and closely cropped hair stood inches from the glass. He admired the sculpture. He admired the beef. The man was Martin Gilder, and he knew the cut intimately, knew it better than an art critic. Gilder happens to be the owner of Martin's Meats, a large meat wholesaler and slaughterhouse and farm, which supplies the carcasses from which Mayer makes her replicas. If anyone here could discern art from life, it was Gilder the butcher. I asked him to critique it.

He shook his head. He flashed a big smile and examined it with the trained eyes of a master craftsman. Was it believable? No, he said, the color was off. But just slightly. "Needs to be redder. Should look wetter—even in water it looks dry." He laughed. "It's above average. It's what you call a very high confirmation; it's almost double muscle. It's graded a 'u-plus-one'—one is fat content. You could eat it, but it would need more fat to taste good."

He went on, "If you went back thirty or forty years, this wouldn't be shocking, because even a small village had a butcher shop and an abattoir. People are so far removed from how meat comes to your table. They see it beautifully packaged in supermarkets and don't associate it with animals anymore. What gives it away is the way it is hanging—all carcasses hang the other way around, because it's the way the meat pulls down from the hind legs and becomes more tender. Also, the neck would be much darker and redder."

Before Hirst's crew headed to a nearby pub, Mayer looked at the beef one last time: "I'm a little scrutinizing but happy. I love the way the fish are interacting with it." She bought the exhibition catalog. Hirst signed it:

For Emily.

Keep it real.

XXX

Damien Hirst

It was great to attend the opening with Mayer and to meet Hirst. But I still hadn't seen Mayer work. Another year went by. Then one day, the phone rang. It was Mayer. Her two terriers, Alice and Gus, had been mysteriously poisoned and died. (No: she buries them. Always.) She was deeply disturbed by this and also very sad. Then she said, "I have another cow here at the moment