Washed up pop singer George Michael has forked over seven million bucks to acquire a dead calf pickled in formaldehyde. The dead calf is pierced with arrows and tied to a post with steel cable. It is called “Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain,” and it is a work of art.
“Saint Sebastian” is the brainchild of Damien Hirst, a British artist who has won the Turner Prize and made himself very, very rich by cutting up animals and doing a lot of other dubious crap. His political views are equally questionable (see also Karlheinz Stockhausen), but right now Hirst is the highest-priced artist on the market, and George Michael and his boyfriend Kenny Goss are big fans. In fact, Michael supposedly has a private art collection valued at $200 million. (This surprises me, as I would have thought that a guy who makes a habit of sleeping in his car wouldn’t have access to that kind of money.) However, that figure should probably be taken with a grain of salt. An art collector these days isn’t exactly Bernard Berenson. He’s more like some guy trying to make a killing in the dot-com stock market bubble. A decade from now, George Michael might well discover that his incredibly pricey pickled animals have become the artistic equivalent of a stack of Confederate war bonds.
