“Damien Hirst carefully places a Coca-Cola can on a simple white plinth. It sits on the grand marble staircase in the foyer of Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum. The Coke can is empty, but it shares the plinth with a giant clam shell, the sort of thing that traps the feet of deep-sea divers in those old film versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As Hirst disappears upstairs, a bystander snatches the Coke can from the plinth. “I’m going to cut the can in half and put it in formaldehyde,” he says gleefully as he stuffs it into his bag. “I’ll call it Damien Hirst in Monaco.” He may be disappointed. The can is not, it turns out, an artistic statement, but simply a piece of litter dropped by Hirst, who has been wandering around the Oceanographic Museum for days, checking and re-checking the 60 works that make up his retrospective show Cornucopia, timed to coincide with the museum’s centenary.”
More: Damien Hirst: ‘Money deserves respect’, The Telegraph UK
