Gary Tinterow on Installing a 20-Ton Shark

NEW YORK—Following three years of speculation on what mega-collector Steven A. Cohen would do with Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde—after he purchased the artwork for $8 million, the piece is finally making a splash as a three-year loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It went on display this week in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern and contemporary art. ARTINFO caught up with Gary Tinterow, curator of the museum’s department of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art, who talked about bringing the sculpture to New York.

How did the loan from Steven and Alexandra Cohen come about?

As soon as I heard that Steven Cohen had acquired the artwork, I talked to him about loaning it to the museum. That was about three years ago. Last January I learned that it was going to be available starting at the end of the summer.

How do you respond to the rumors that Cohen is using the exhibition at the Met to increase the work’s value?

Museums don’t set values. People who believe that don’t understand how the art market works.

What does showing the shark mean for the museum?

It’s very exciting. We have only a select number of works produced in the last 20 years here at the Met, and this is one of the most celebrated. It’s kind of the poster child for changes in contemporary art and the development of artists in Britain and America over the past 15 to 20 years, and yet it deals with issues that artists have looked at for at least 200 years.

How do you interpret the work?

I could write at least a dozen pages on that; I can’t boil that down into one sentence. But it doesn’t really matter what it means to me. It’s here for visitors to the museum to interpret for themselves.

The shark is 13 feet long and is suspended in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde, making it more than 20 tons. How do you install such an unwieldy—and potentially hazardous—work?

The components are extremely large, too large to install in a normal art-handling way. We actually had to rip out an office underneath the work in order to shore up the floor beams. The path it took through the building on its way to the galleries had to be protected. We also had to make sure that no one would be subjected to harmful vapors, so we installed a new ventilation system.

How long did the entire process take?

Six weeks.

Originally, the Met said the shark would go on display right after Labor Day, but it just opened on Tuesday.

We had delays.

What kind of delays?

Just delays.

Hirst had to replace the shark in this piece last year because the original was decaying. Another of his tank pieces, Mother and Child Divided, which features dead cows, sprang a leak this month at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo. Do you foresee conservation challenges over the next three years? Is the owner responsible for repairs?

It wouldn’t be us. We don’t deal with taxidermy issues.