Killing the Emperors Read Free Page A

wowed Charles Saatchi.’
    ‘I know about Saatchi too,’ said Pooley. ‘A plutocratic adman who made another big fortune out of dreadful art.’
    ‘He’s married to Nigella Lawson,’ said the baroness. ‘Yum, yum. That’s Nigella. Not her food.’ She paused. ‘Well, the food’s not bad, but compared to Nigella’s sumptuous…’
    ‘Stop drooling, Jack,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Saatchi offered Hirst a £50,000 commission to do whatever he darned well liked and the result was a shark in formaldehyde in a giant glass tank (or vitrine, as the cognoscenti call it) called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living .’
    ‘Hence my The Physical Impossibility of Producing Art if You’ve No Fucking Talent ,’ beamed the baroness. ‘But tell Ellis what happened to the unfortunate shark.’
    ‘ It rotted, a fin fell off and the liquid went murky. Someone said instead of watching a tiger shark hunting for dinner it was like entering Norman Bates’ fruit cellar and finding Mother embalmed in her chair. Adding bleach made it worse. After cleaning up it was still disgustingly green and wrinkled.’
    ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance Saatchi threw it out?’ enquired Pooley.
    Amiss and the baroness guffawed in unison.
    ‘Don’t be daft, hon.’ said Mary Lou. ‘We’re talking about the asylum that’s contemporary art. The Saatchi curators skinned it and stretched the skin over a fibreglass mould. The poor thing sure didn’t look good. But that didn’t stop fuckwits clamouring to possess it. Sir Nicholas Serota…’
    ‘Who?’
    The baroness erupted. ‘You know perfectly well who he is, Ellis. He’s the bloody nincompoop who will be first into my tumbril. He runs an empire of galleries including that storehouse of junk known as Tate Modern. Tat Modern more like.’
    Pooley spoke slowly. ‘What…happened…to…the…wretched…shark?’
    ‘I feel we’re on a postmodern journey,’ said Amiss. ‘We could call it Cherchez le cadaver. ’ He saw Pooley’s face. ‘Sorry.’
    Mary Lou patted Pooley’s hand again. ‘Saatchi enlisted an American international celebrity dealer called Larry Gagosian, hon, and he rang around the usual suspects. Allegedly Serota offered two million bucks…’
    ‘Of tax-payers’ money,’ snorted the baroness.
    ‘…but it wasn’t enough.’
    ‘There are celebrity dealers?’ asked Pooley.
    ‘There are celebrity hairdressers,’ said Amiss. ‘Celebrity cake-makers. For all I know there are celebrity undertakers. Of course there are celebrity dealers.’
    ‘The Gagosian dude isn’t known as “Go-Go” for no reason,’ continued Mary Lou. ‘He flogged what remained of the shark to the American billionaire art collector…’
    ‘…celebrity art collector,’ put in Amiss.
    ‘…Steve Cohen for somewhere around eight million bucks.’
    Pooley looked stunned. ‘There’s more,’ said Mary Lou. ‘Hirst seems to have suffered from scruples, so he obligingly spent a few thou on a job-lot of sharks and replaced Cohen’s later that year, had another stuffed, gave it some fancy conceptual bullshit name and sold it to a Korean museum for four million.’
    ‘Scruples my fanny,’ said the baroness. ‘He made Cohen pay the costs of the replacement.’
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    ‘The only surprise is that he didn’t charge the shark.’ She gazed at Pooley’s shocked expression with grim satisfaction. ‘Oh, and incidentally, Charles Saatchi, asked some years later if refurbishing Hirst’s shark robbed it of its meaning as art, replied “Completely.” Needless to say he said that when he no longer owned it.’ She gesticulated at the crystal jug. ‘Pour some more martinis, Robert. Ellis needs sustenance to bolster his strength so as to cope with the calf.’
    ‘Oh, yep,’ said Mary Lou. ‘The calf. You’d better do this, Jack. You’re more up to speed on this than me.’
    The baroness waited until Amiss had refilled her glass.