Thirty years ago, when I walked into the Saatchi gallery in London, I saw something wildly liberating and compulsive: a huge tiger shark that seemed to swim forward through clear blue liquid, with just a sheet of glass between you and its jaws. But the shark you see on entering Damien Hirst’s survey of his formaldehyde creations is not the same work: it’s Jaws 2, or even Jaws 3, the one where the mother shark attacks an aquarium. It is called Death Denied and was made in 2008, a fresher version of the notoriously decaying original, titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But even 14 years is a long time for a dead shark, and this one’s getting very shrunken around the mouth.
