In 1991, collector Charles Saatchi handed Damien Hirst a blank check, and the result was The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a 14-foot tiger shark, caught by a fisherman in Queensland, suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. This episode traces the piece from its roughly 50,000 pound production budget and a 6,000 pound bounty for the shark itself, through its 1992 London debut, where the tabloids dismissed it as an expensive portion of fish and chips.

Then biology took over. The preservation failed, the shark began to putrefy, gallery staff added bleach to the cloudy tank, and by 1993 the carcass had been skinned and stretched over a fiberglass mold. We follow the 2004 sale to Steve Cohen for an estimated 8 to 12 million dollars, the complete replacement of the shark under a Natural History Museum curator, and th ...